Contagious Ebola Carriers May Show No Symptoms

German doctors show CDC wrong about spread of disease

WND

JEROME R. CORSI

NEW YORK – A group of German medical doctors in a peer-reviewed medical journal article published by Oxford University Press have challenged a key assumption regarding the Ebola virus repeatedly asserted by Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The researchers found that a patient showing no symptoms of the disease can still transmit a virus like Ebola by air if droplets containing the virus are transmitted to another person by a sneeze or cough.

As WND reported Tuesday, the World Health Organization has admitted that “wet and bigger droplets from a heavily infected individual, who has respiratory symptoms caused by other conditions or who vomits violently could transmit the Ebola virus over a short distance to another nearby person.”

WHO said it could happen when “virus-laden heavy droplets are directly propelled, by coughing or sneezing onto the mucus membranes or skin with cuts or abrasions of another person.”

Still, WHO added a qualification, insisting the transmission of Ebola by sneezing or coughing is not within its definition of airborne transmission.

News broke Wednesday morning that the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S., Thomas Eric Duncan, had died in Dallas. The victim’s home neighborhood in the Liberian capital, meanwhile, remained under quarantine.

Later Wednesday, a Texas sheriff’s deputy was rushed to the hospital in Frisco, Texas, with Ebola symptoms after delivering a quarantine notice to the apartment where Duncan was staying.

WND reported Wednesday Liberia is preventing journalists from reporting Ebola-related stories from health care centers in the country unless they obtain written permission from the government. The news came as the World Health Organization issued a statement warning that the officially reported decline in new cases in Liberia over the past three weeks “is unlikely to be genuine,” because problems with data gathering continue.

‘Not easily detected’

The German physicians, led by Dr. Timm H. Westhoff of the Department of Nephrology at the Carité Campus Benjamin Franklin in Berlin, noted in a virology blog published Feb. 12, 2009, that acute viral infections such as Ebola hemorrhagic fever may cause little or no clinical symptoms in a so-called “inapparent infection” yet may be contagious.

“A well-known example is poliovirus: over 90% are without infections,” Westhoff and his colleagues continued. “During an inapparent infection, sufficient virus replication occurs in the host to induce antiviral antibodies, but not enough to cause disease. Such infections are important for the spread of infection, because they are not easily detected.”

Read More Here

Reposted with permission