India need not be too concerned about Ebola outbreak: expert

April 18, 2015 12:00 am | Updated 08:08 am IST - Thiruvananthapuram:

Non-endemic countries such as India need not be too concerned about the current Ebola outbreak as the highly pathogenic Ebola virus species has so far been found only in Africa.

Yet every country needs to prepare its public health system and build the necessary diagnostic infrastructure and research capabilities to deal with any pathogen which can cause unexpected and devastating outbreaks, Thomas Hoenen, Laboratory of Virology, National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Health, U.S., said.

Dr. Hoenen was delivering a lecture on ‘Responding to Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa’ at the Molecular Virology Conference organised by the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology here on Friday. Ebola virus outbreaks are not that difficult to contain and nations in Central Africa, which are used to having annual outbreaks, are adept at recognising the outbreak and adopting rapid control measures to contain the transmission. Even in the middle of the current outbreak in West Africa, there was a smaller outbreak in Central Africa which was quickly contained.

Unprecedented

The current Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa has been unprecedented in terms of the length of the outbreak and number of people affected with about 25,550 cases and 10, 587 deaths recorded in 2014-15. Despite the devastation it has wreaked, laboratory studies have shown that ebola virus has remained more or less stable and has not mutated and, hence, fears that the disease will become more severe or extremely transmissible have no grounds.

The current outbreak is far from over but new cases have been dropping for the past few months. But this is a very critical time and health systems need to maintain high level of vigil, Dr. Hoenen said.

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