Just how long does the Ebola virus linger in semen?

The 2013-2016 West African Ebola virus outbreak altered our perception of just what an Ebola outbreak could look like.

While none of the three primary affected countries--Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-have had a case since April 2016, the outbreak resulted in a total of over 28,000 cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD)--65 times higher than the previous largest EVD outbreak, and more than 15 times the total number of cases of all prior EVD outbreaks combined, from the virus's discovery in 1976 to a concurrent (but unrelated) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014.

In March 2016, cases were identified once again in both Liberia and Guinea, just after the outbreak had been declared over. Both countries were declared Ebola-free in June 2016; Guinea for the second time and Liberia for the fourth time. The last series of cases in these countries demonstrated just how different this epidemic was from prior ones, changing what we thought we knew about the virus:

Previous research suggested Ebola could persist in the semen for 40 to 90 days. But that window has been eclipsed in this epidemic by a considerable amount. A probable case of sexual transmission occurred approximately six months after the patient’s initial infection last year in Liberia. Another study found evidence of Ebola in the semen of 25% of surviving men tested seven to nine months after infection. And it takes only a single transmission to kick off a fresh recurrence of the disease.

A recent paper extended this window of virus persistence in the semen even longer--over 500 days. It also explains how the outbreaks began in both countries after being declared Ebola-free--so where did the virus come from?

In a convergence of old-fashioned, "shoe leather" epidemiology/tracing of cases and viral genomics, two converging lines of evidence led to the identification of the same individual: a man who had been confirmed as an EVD case in 2014, and had sexual contact with one of the new cases. Author Nick Loman discussed via email:

The epidemiologists told us independently that they had identified a survivor and we were amazed when we decoded the metadata to find that case was indeed the same person. The sequencing and epidemiology is tightly coordinated via Guinea's Ministry of Health who ran National Coordination for the Ebola outbreak and the World Health Organisation.

It shows that the genomics and epidemiology works best when working hand-in-hand. If we’d just had the genomics or the epidemiology we’d still have an element of doubt.

The sequencing results also suggested that it was likely that the new viral outbreak was caused by this survivor, and unlikely that the outbreak was due to another "spillover" of the virus from the local animal population, according to author Andrew Rambaut:

If the virus was present in bats and jumped to humans again in 2016, it might be genetically similar to the viruses in the human outbreak but not have any of the mutations that uniquely arose in the human outbreak (it would have its own unique mutations that had arisen in the bat population since the virus that caused human epidemic).

It might be possible that the virus jumped from humans to some animal reservoir in the region and then back to humans in 2016 but because we have the virus sequence from the patients acute disease 15 months earlier we can see that it essentially exactly the same virus. So this makes it certain the virus was persisting in this individual for the period.

So the virus--persisting in the survivor's semen for at least 531 days--sparked a new wave of cases. Ebola researcher Daniel Bausch noted elsewhere that “The virus does seem to persist longer than we’ve ever recognized before. Sexual transmission still seems to be rare, but the sample size of survivors now is so much larger than we’ve ever had before (maybe 3,000-5,000 sexually active males versus 50-100 for the largest previous outbreak) that we’re picking up rare events.”

And we're now actively looking for those rare events, too. The Liberia Men's Health Screening Program already reports detection of Ebola virus in the semen at 565 days following symptoms, suggesting we will need to remain vigilant about survivors in both this and any future EVD epidemics. The challenges are clear--we need to investigate EVD survivors as patients, research participants, and possible viral reservoirs--each of which comes with unique difficulties. By continuing to learn as much as we can from this outbreak, perhaps we can contain future outbreaks more quickly--and prevent others from igniting.