After surviving Ebola virus disease, at least 13,000 survivors could be suffering chronic illnesses, global health experts have said. Most common illnesses

are serious joint pain and eye inflammation that could lead to blindness, especially among survivors who fought off the most severe bouts of infection, reported Reuters news agency.

 

World Health Organization experts said the survivor’s was becoming “an emergency within an emergency.” “The world has never seen such a large number of survivors from an Ebola outbreak,” said Anders Nordstrom, a WHO representative in Sierra Leone who took part in a five-day conference this week about Ebola survivors.

 

“This is new - both from a medical and from a societal point of view,” he told reporters on a telebriefing. Daniel Bausch of the WHO’s clinical care team on Ebola survivors said about half of all those who fought off the virus now report joint pain, with some suffering such severe effects

that they can’t work.

 

Eye problems including inflammation, impaired vision and - in severe but rare cases - blindness, have been reported by about 25 percent of survivors, Bausch

said.

 

 

Less measurable but equally serious longterm problems, such as increasing rates of depression, post traumatic stress disorder and social exclusion, are also affecting survivors.

 

But scientists are unable to say whether the chronic health problems are unusual, because the epidemic was the largest ever seen, infecting more than 27,000 people and killing almost 11,300 of them.

 

They believe the vision impairments reported by survivors of the current outbreak are probably linked to the virus persisting in the eyes. The virus survives at most 21 days in most body fluidswhich are primary means of transmission-but is known to be able to survive in semen and in soft tissues of the eye for several months after recovery. Bausch said sight problems, joint pain and headaches have been reported in a few survivors of previous outbreaks since the disease was first detected in 1976.

 

By Judd-Leonard Okafor

Daily Trust