Isolating the sickest Ebola-infected individuals before they progress into their late phase of illness can play a major role in effectively controlling and eventually ending the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, according to a modeling study recently published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
Researchers developed a random transmission model to determine how disease progression and case fatality affect transmission and how patient isolation could achieve the goal of eliminating the disease. They confirmed that the risk for transmitting Ebola depends on the magnitude of viral load in an infected individual and the number of people with whom the infected individual interacts.
Differentiating between survivors and non-survivors is important because survivors tend to achieve peak viral load approximately four days after symptoms develop, and then viral load declines. Survivors were found to have a 32 percent probability of infecting at least one other individual during their infection period. In non-survivors, viral load is 100-fold higher than that of survivors throughout infection and does not decline after peak. Non-survivors also exhibit more severe Ebola-specific symptoms as illness progresses. Non-survivors had a 67 percent probability of transmitting Ebola to at least one other person.
The researchers' model suggests that isolating the most severely ill individuals (the likely non-survivors) within four days of the onset of symptoms could enable elimination of the disease in Liberia. Read the study.
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