Ebola virus outbreaks, such as the 2014 Makona epidemic in West Africa, are episodic and deadly. Filovirus antivirals are currently not clinically available. Our findings suggest interferon gamma, an FDA-approved drug, may serve as a novel and effective prophylactic or treatment option. Using mouse-adapted Ebola virus, we found that murine interferon gamma administered 24 hours before or after ...

Four Ebola patients received care at Emory University Hospital, presenting a unique opportunity to examine the cellular immune responses during acute Ebola virus infection. We found striking activation of both B and T cells in all four patients. Plasmablast frequencies were 10-50% of B cells, compared with less than 1% in healthy individuals. Many of these proliferating plasmablasts were IgG-po...

Motivation Ebola viruses are not pathogenic but can be adapted to replicate and cause disease in rodents. Here, we used a structural bioinformatics approach to analyze the mutations associated with Ebola virus adaptation to rodents to elucidate the determinants of host-specific Ebola virus pathogenicity. Results We identified 33 different mutations associated with Ebola virus adaptation to ro...

A 3-month ecologic investigation was done to identify the reservoir of Ebola virus following the 1995 outbreak in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Efforts focused on the fields where the putative primary case had worked but included other habitats near Kikwit. Samples were collected from 3066 vertebrates and tested for the presence of antibodies to Ebola (subtype Zaire) virus: All test...

Surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors can rapidly detect Ebola antigens at the point-of-care without the need for added reagents, sample processing, or specialized personnel. This preliminary study demonstrates SAW biosensor detection of the Ebola virus in a concentration-dependent manner. The detection limit with this methodology is below the average level of viremia detected on the first day of...

Methods To create and validate a detailed syndrome definition for Ebola, we utilized the literature based methodology developed and documented by GUARDIAN researchers.1,2 The syndrome definition utilized clinical signs and symptoms that were documented in historical Ebola cases. A testing sample of 800 randomly selected emergency department cases (i.e., true negative cases) and 200 syntheticall...

Members of the family Filoviridae, which currently consists of Ebola and Marburg viruses, cause severe and often fatal hemorrhagic fevers in humans and nonhuman primates. The recent isolation and identification of a new Ebola virus from a single nonfatal human case in Côte d’Ivoire (1) and the more recent outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in and around Kikwit, Zaire (2, 3), have raised concer...

Little is known about the residual effects of the west African Ebola virus disease (Ebola) epidemic on non-Ebola mortality and health-seeking behavior in Sierra Leone. We conducted a retrospective household survey to estimate mortality and describe health-seeking behavior in Western Area, Sierra Leone, between May 25, 2014, and February 16, 2015. We used two-stage cluster sampling, selected 30 ...

S ince December 2013, an outbreak of Ebola virus disease in the West African nation of Guinea has rapidly evolved into a humanitarian crisis of unforeseen proportions, overwhelming vulnerable communities in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Senegal. While previous outbreaks of Ebola cumulatively resulted in 2,486 cases and 1,590 deaths, the current Ebola epidemic has so far resulted in 8,376 ...

The Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as a hemorrhagic fever and discovered in 1976, is dangerous, highly infectious disease with very high mortality. There are no licensed therapeutics against EVD, although a range of medicines and therapies are currently being evaluated. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, an experimental drug named ZMapp was administered on an emergency basis to seven pa...