Saturday, January 24, 2009

Authorities detect local human infection by Ebola strain

Saturday, January 24, 2009 | MANILA, PHILIPPINES

Authorities on Friday reported that they have tested one local worker positive for antibodies to the Ebola Reston virus, saying they were still determining if this was the first jump to humans from hogs, even if it had been found in a few people in the 1990s.

"We are looking at the risk of exposure, if the virus was transferred from pig to human or from other [source]," Eric Tayag, chief of the National Epidemiology Center of the Health department, told reporters in a briefing.

He stressed, however, that the person had recovered from the infection. The World Health Organization (WHO) Web site said Ebola Reston causes only mild flu-like symptoms in people, who quickly recover.

"For now, there is no sign that it [virus] is dangerous to humans," Mr. Tayag said in a TV interview Friday night. "The fact that the person developed antibodies means his body was able to fight the virus."

Mr. Tayag said experts were still trying to trace where the person concerned contracted the virus. "Right now, we cannot link it to pigs," he stressed.

Health Secretary Francisco T. Duque III said in the same briefing that the antibodies developed by the person concerned showed that "it was an old infection, maybe [the exposure was] 18 months to two years ago."

He stressed that the virus posed "negligible risk to human health" for now.

The WHO Web site that while humans had tested positive of the strain during the outbreak among macaques in the Philippines from 1989-1996, detection in two hog farms in Luzon last year was the first time the strain was found in pigs. The Ebola Reston virus was first discovered in the Philippines in 1989 among crab-eating macaques that were exported to Hazleton Laboratories in Reston, Virginia.

The 22-man mission composed of experts from WHO, World Organization for Animal Health, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, as well as from the Agriculture and Health departments, tested 50 persons in farms and slaughterhouse who might have been exposed to infected hogs. The 10-day mission ended late last week.

Mr. Duque said the government will also test more blood samples taken from hogs earlier during a foot-and-mouth disease detection campaign. "We have on hand more than 4,000 blood samples and those are now being subjected to tests," he said.

"We have many blood samples in the Bureau of Animal Industry so it can be an additional step to test it for possible [Ebola Reston] infection," Renato R. Eleria, chairman of the National Federation of Hog Farmers, Inc., said in an interview at the sidelines of the press conference.

The government kept under quarantine the two hog farms in the towns of Pandi in Bulacan and Manaoag in Pangasinan where tissue samples of infected hogs were taken.

Furthermore, the voluntary export ban by the government will stay, Agriculture Secretary Arthur C. Yap said in a breifing.

The Matutum Meat Packing Corp. in Polomolok, South Cotabato was set to make its first export shipment of pork and pork products on December 10 last year, the same day the Agriculture and Health departments slapped the ban on pork exports due to the detection of the Ebola strain.
hat-tip Rickk

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