Zaire Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak in Guinea

       An outbreak of Ebola occurred in Guinea earlier this year and was later found to be the Zaire Ebola strain. It was reported to have the same type of symptoms as Ebola and it had a high case-fatality rate. It was identified as the Zaire strain after analyzing some blood samples from infected individuals. There were seven different methods when going through this investigation of this disease. The first method was that they had to obtain blood samples from about 20 patients that showed the symptoms of the disease. The second method was to perform diagnostic assays, which investigated the viral ribonucleic acid to see whether or not filoviruses were detected. The third method was to perform viral sequencing, which was to sequence the genomes of the Ebola Virus by using polymerase-chain-reaction, or PCR. This helps to analyze the viral RNA more closely to basically just sequence the virus. The fourth method was viral isolation, which was to isolate the growth of the virus in the different cells and to use antibodies specific to a certain Ebola strain to see if there was going to be an increase in viral levels in the culture of the cell. This was measured by using PCR again, but this time it was in real-time so it is called RT-PCR. The fifth method was to use electron microscopy to use a negative stain on the organism to test and better see if the virus looked to have similar qualities of Ebola. The sixth method was to use phylogenetic analysis and compared the new Ebola Virus sequences that were obtained with 48 filovirus genome sequences that were obtained from GenBank. This information was separated into different phylogenetic trees that helped display the information properly and show what specific strain of Ebola it may be, as seen below. 

(Figure 3, Emergence of Zaire Ebola Virus Disease in Guinea)

The seventh and last method called for the use of epidemiologic investigations that looked through other possible transmissions, going through hospital records and interviewed many people that could possibly have had exposure to the Ebola Virus. The results show that an Ebola Virus strain was identified but it seemed to be different than the other five and seemed to surface from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon. This outbreak occurred in March of 2014 and the first transmission of the disease seemed to appear in December of the previous year. This eventually spread to this village in Guinea and caused this severe outbreak of the disease. The main reason they were able to diagnose this as Ebola Virus was the clinical symptoms that were being shown by the patients. An epidemiologic curve was also created by graphing the number of cases of Ebola against the time frame of the disease, as seen below. 

(Figure 4, Emergence of Zaire Ebola Virus Disease in Guinea)

They discussed where they were thinking of taking their research next and I completely agree. That would be to find the animal that caused this outbreak, or simply the causative agent, and help to eradicate that possibility from ever happening again.                              

      Bibliography:                                                                                                                                             "Emergence of Zaire Ebola Virus Disease in Guinea - Preliminary Report — NEJM." New England Journal of Medicine. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 June 2014. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1404505#t=article