Post Ebola Syndrome

Josephine is one of Liberia’s 1,500 Ebola survivors. Like Josephine, many today suffer memory loss, joint pains, muscle aches and eye problems. These are not isolated anecdotes and vague reports. Just last week, reporting the first findings from the largest-ever study of Ebola survivors at a conference in Boston, Mosoka Fallah, an epidemiologist from Liberia, said more than half of the patients who lived through an acute attack later reported muscle and joint problems. Two thirds had neurological difficulties and 60 percent reported eye problems approximately one year after Ebola infection.

Doctors began referring to this constellation of symptoms as post-Ebola syndrome as early as fall 2014 when the World Health Organization sent a team of researchers to Sierra Leone. Half of the Ebola survivors they met reported eye problems, including blindness. And this has happened before. Following small Ebola outbreaks in east and central Africa in the last 20 years, survivors suffered joint pains, muscle aches and eye problems serious enough to prevent many from working.

Read the article in its entirety from Scientific American.