2014/08/29
■エボラ突然変異中”Ebola virus has mutated during course of outbreak”
エボラウイルスが
アウトブレイク中に
突然変異を頻回に行っているようです。
それが何を意味するか
分かりませんが、
スーパーエボラの出現になるのかもしれませんし、
逆に弱毒化して広がるかもしれません。
Ebola virus has mutated during course of outbreak
Washington Post
By Brady Dennis August 28 at 2:02 PM
The Ebola virus sweeping through West Africa has mutated repeatedly during the current outbreak, a fact that could hinder diagnosis and treatment of the devastating disease, according to scientists who have genetically sequenced the virus in scores of victims.
The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, also offer new insights into the origins of the largest and most deadly Ebola outbreak in history, which has killed more than 1,500 people in four countries and shows few signs of slowing. It also provided another reminder of the deep toll the outbreak has taken on health workers and others in the affected areas, as five of the paper’s more than 50 co-authors died from Ebola before publication.
In a collaboration led by scientists at Harvard University and aided by officials at Sierra Leone’s health ministry, researchers sequenced Ebola virus genomes from 78 patients beginning in the early days of the outbreak this spring. Those 99 samples — some patients were tested more than once — suggested that the outbreak began with a single human infection before spreading rapidly, like a spark that grows into a wildfire.
Ebola’s arrival in Sierra Leone in May started with a funeral, according to Thursday’s findings. A young pregnant woman tested positive for the virus and was treated at Kenema Government Hospital. Health workers who traced her contacts discovered that she and more than a dozen other women recently had attended the burial of a traditional healer who had been treating Ebola patients near the Sierra Leone-Guinea border. All of them had been infected.
“They realized she was not an isolated case,” said Pardis Sabeti, an associate professor at Harvard whose lab sequenced the Ebola genomes and quickly made public the data earlier this summer.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa eventually could exceed 20,000 cases, more than six times as many as are known now, according to the World Health Organization. (AP)
The genomic sequencing also offers hints as to how the Ebola “Zaire” strain at the heart of the current outbreak — one of five types of Ebola virus known to infect humans — likely ended up in West Africa in the first place. Researchers said the data suggests that the virus spread from an animal host, possibly bats, and that diverged around 2004 from an Ebola strain in central Africa, where previous outbreaks have occurred.
“We don’t actually know where the virus has been since then,” said Sabeti, referring to the time between 2004 and when the virus resurfaced earlier this year. “We’re trying to piece together an historical record.”
Thursday’s study also details hundreds of genetic mutations that make the current Ebola outbreak different from any in the past. Some of those changes have the potential to affect the accuracy of diagnostic tests or the effectiveness of vaccines and treatments under development for the disease.
“We’ve uncovered more than 300 genetic clues about what sets this outbreak apart from previous outbreaks,” Stephen Gire, one of the study’s co-authors and an infectious disease researcher at Harvard, said in an announcement about the findings. “Although we don’t know whether these differences are related to the severity of the current outbreak, by sharing these data with the research community, we hope to speed up our understanding of this epidemic and support global efforts to contain it.”
Sabeti said researchers are expecting to receive additional Ebola samples soon from Nigeria. They plan to sequence those, as well, and release the data as soon as possible.
“The fact that we can do this in real time while the outbreak is still going is breathtaking,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, said of the group’s rapid genomic sequencing of the virus, which he said could have taken two years or longer in the past. “We didn’t have this technology years ago. What they did was really extraordinary.”
感染した人間が半分以上死ぬ、
ということは
ウイルス的にはあまり広く広がる前に
宿主が死んでしまいます。
人間の生存率が上がるように弱毒化すると
逆に世界中に拡散するかもしれません。
ウイルス的には
ロシアンルーレット状態です。
ご参考になりましたら幸いです。
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