[ 2015-01-30 ]

Ebola virus mutating but will not become airborne, scientists say
The Ebola virus that has claimed nearly 9,000
lives across West Africa is gradually mutating but
will not become airborne, scientists said on
Thursday.

Experts at the Institut Pasteur in France - named
after Louis Pasteur, who created the first
vaccines for rabies - have spent recent months
analysing hundreds of blood samples from Ebola
patients in Guinea.

On Thursday they warned that it was still too
early in their research to say whether mutations
in the virus thus far would lead to more lethal or
infectious strains.

But Dr Anavaj Sakuntabhai, an Oxford-educated
geneticist involved in the research, said that
claims that the virus might move from being
fluid-borne to airborne - and potentially much
more infectious - were a near-scientific
impossibility.

That theory was voiced last October by Anthony
Banbury, the head of the United Nations mission on
Ebola, who said it was a “nightmare scenario’
but that it “could not be ruled out”.

However, Mr Sakuntabhai told The Telegraph: “I
don’t think is likely. For any pathogen (agent
of disease) to change its mode of transmission
would it means they would have to adapt to a
com-pletely different environment.” He likened
it to a fish developing lungs or a human growing
gills.

In remarks that will be of relief to health chiefs
battling the Ebola outbreak, he also said that the
mutations detected the Ebola virus so far were of
a routine kind showed by most viruses, and were
caused simply by minute fluctuations caused by
constant duplication. “It’s like copying
some-thing out long-hand - the more times you
write it out, the less the later copies will
probably resemble the original.”

A more worrying scenario would have been signs of
the virus actively adapting to different
condi-tions. Such is the behaviour of the
so-called “intelligent” HIV virus, which makes
it difficult to develop cures for.

Dr Sakuntabhai added: “We don’t think that the
Ebola is particular clever, and it doesn’t seem
like it can change that much, although we need to
more research before we draw any definitive
conclu-sions.”

Some 8,641 people have now died from the Ebola
outbreak, with 21,724 confirmed cases.

Source - The Telegraph

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