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from the just-when-you-think-its-safe-to-go-back-in-the-water dept.
For the first time, Ebola has been discovered inside the eyes of a patient just months after the virus was gone from his blood.
Dr. Ian Crozier, 43, was flown last September to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for treatment after contracting Ebola while working in Sierra Leone. After a serious battle, he was eventually deemed cured and released.
But a burning sensation in his left eye, a sensitivity to light and the feeling that something was stuck in his eye continued to bother him. Later he suffered blurred vision, pain and inflammation, and the colour of his eye turned from grey to green. When doctors tested the aqueous humour, the watery substance inside the eye, it tested positive for Ebola.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/deadly-ebola-virus-lurked-grew-eye-cured-physician-doctors-discover-1500253
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RedBear on Monday May 11 2015, @01:02AM
The situation with Ebola is apparently even worse than what is described in the summary. Behold:
I hope everyone realizes exactly what this means. Ebola survivors face the possibility of becoming walking Typhoid Mary's, capable of transmitting the infection months or even years later through intimate contact (sex) or through handling your remains (no matter what your actual cause of death). If doctors have been "shocked" that the virus can continue to survive and propagate for months in the eye or the testes, there's no particular scientific reason that I know of that they won't eventually find out that survivors can carry the virus for years or even decades, possibly at undetectable levels like HIV. And they said the man's tears and eyelids tested negative for the virus so there was no risk of catching it from contact, but since the virus is obviously propagating within the eye what guarantee is there that it won't eventually find its way out of the interior of the eye and start spreading to other people? None that I can see. If nothing else won't the eye eventually be degraded by the infection to the point where it will physically lose integrity and start leaking?
These findings mean Ebola is actually even more difficult to control than we thought. Quite scary. We need to stop playing around with silly little wars and start spending those trillions of dollars on finding effective vaccines for this kind of stuff, and making sure that everyone on the planet gets access to it. HIV is a joke compared to a possible widespread Ebola pandemic. The only remaining "good" thin about Ebola is that it kills quickly and with easily identifiable symptoms, so we can fairly easily stop outbreaks in their tracks and trace them back to a "patient zero". If a strain of Ebola ever evolved that started acting like HIV and hanging around propagating slowly for months or years before it tried to kill you, we could be seriously screwed since it could end up spreading to millions of people before we noticed anything.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ