Ebola – hiding in eyeballs

Samantha Roper

15th April 2016

Ebola is a pretty terrifying disease because it is so deadly, and even survivors never seem to be able to shake it off. The Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey who was flown out of Sierra Leone suffering from Ebola symptoms shortly after I arrived in the country, is still suffering relapses now, even after she has been successfully treated.

One of the strangest long-term complications caused by the Ebola virus is iritis, or inflammation of the iris in the eye. When I was staffing a survivors’ clinic, I saw an American doctor whose eyes changed from brown to blue after he contracted Ebola.

It was just one of the weird side-effects which haunted victims long after they were apparently clear of the disease, all because Ebola can hide in parts of the body which are ‘protected’ from the immune system, including the inside of the eyeball. The virus lies dormant in these secret places and can re-emerge, many months after treatment has finished. In the case of Pauline Cafferkey, the virus had probably hidden in her cerebral fluid, remerging to cause symptoms of meningitis-inflammation of the meninges around the brain.

see more at: http://www.hippocraticpost.com/call-of-duty/samantha-roper-ebola/