The study authors include Professor Peter Piot and Dr Joel Breman, who travelled to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), to investigate the first outbreak in 1976. The study, published in Epidemics, also found that if the people in the affected community had not changed their behaviour in 1976, the outbreak could have been much larger – potentially as large as the current outbreak in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Previous analysis of the outbreak has looked at the overall number of cases over time, but this is the first time that researchers have been able to quantify the contribution of hospital-based transmission (via contaminated syringe) and community transmission (person-to-person transmission via infection from an infected living or dead patient in the community) to Ebola transmission during the outbreak. Dr Adam Kucharski, Research Fellow in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and joint lead author on the study, said: This is the first time that it has been possible to calculate how transmissible Ebola is in the community, and it gives us a better understanding of where transmission occurs, and where infection needs to be controlled. Our results suggest that changes in behaviour, such as changing traditional funeral practices to avoid catching the virus from infected corpses, led to effective reduction in person-to-person transmission in the community and were essential in reducing the potential size of the 1976 outbreak. If the reduction in community transmission had been smaller then the outbreak could have persisted for much longer
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 16:57:02 +0000
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