Two Years Later, Ebola Is a Ticking Time Bomb

Ebola survivors could be carrying live Ebola virus in their eyes. Many of them are going blind, but in fear of the epidemic's resurgence, hardly anyone is doing anything about it.

One morning, in Atlanta, Georgia, Ebola survivor and infectious disease physician Ian Crozier walked up to his bathroom mirror to brush his teeth and did a double take. His formerly blue left eye had turned green.

He’d been experiencing strange ophthalmological symptoms for weeks, and a diagnostic test revealed the culprit: the Ebola virus, relentlessly stalking him. Though undetectable in his blood, the virus had been squatting for months in the anterior chamber of the eye, replicating without spurring an immune response. Now, Crozier was losing his vision.

After three weeks, an experimental treatment restored the eye’s pressure, shape, and soon thereafter, sight. But the case of viral persistence continues to disturb researchers worldwide. Was Crozier’s left eye an outlier phenomenon, or were the eyes of the other 15,000 Ebola survivors teeming with the virus as well? And if they are, what does it mean for thousands to carry around a live virus that could, with the slightest surgical hiccup, escape back into the population?

see more at: http://pulitzercenter.org/projects/two-years-later-ebola-ticking-time-bomb