“The cases are not only the first in the Philippines, but also the first in the world,” Bartolome told Punto! in a telephone interview following confirmation from a US-based laboratory that tissue samples from some pigs in areas in Bulacan, Nueva Ecija and Pangasinan indeed showed Ebola virus contamination.
Bartolome said that he was surprised by the announcement made the other day by the Department of Agriculture (DA) confirming Ebola in local pigs. “Before the Ebola confirmation, nothing obviously abnormal had been noted at the affected farms,” he said.
“It must have been initially a confidential issue,” he said, recalling that tissues from local pigs were sent to a laboratory in the United States amid cases of cholera, flu, and porcine respiratory and reproductive diseases.
“It was through these tests in the US that the Ebola was uncovered,” he said.
The US Department of Agriculture’s Plum Island laboratory, off Long Island, isolated Ebola-Reston from the swine samples. The virus subtype was discovered in the US in 1989 in association with an outbreak of viral hemorrhagic fever among monkeys imported from the Philippines to Reston, Virginia after whom the Ebola sub-type was named.
Quarantine measures have been imposed in the affected areas whose exact locations have not been revealed by the government. The DA has not disclosed the exact location of the infected farms, but it said that, together with the Department of Health, it has organized a team to collect blood samples from people and animals in the affected areas.
Tests so far conducted on people working at the affected farms showed none of them affected by Ebola-Reston, although more tests on animals are being done.
Research shows that although the infection with the virus can be fatal in monkeys, it’s not known to cause severe disease in people. It is unlike an Ebola strain from Africa which usually causes death in 50 to 90 percent of people, according to the World Health Organization.
In a statement the other day, the DA said the pig Ebola outbreak was “considered of negligible public health importance.”
Wire reports cited Gregory Hartl, spokesman for WHO in Geneva, as saying that “While it’s believed that Ebola-Reston is primarily a disease of animals, we are working with the Philippines government to see if there are any potential risks to humans. At the moment, we believe the risks are quite low.”
Reacting to the Ebola found for the first time in pigs, WHO veterenarian Barrie Carnat was quoted as saying that “We have more questions than we have answers at this stage.”
“It’s really unknown at this point if Ebola is an incidental finding or if it had any role in the mortality of the pigs,” wire reports quoted him from Paris.
Carnat also confirmed the it’s the first time Ebola has been reported in pigs.
Ebola virus first came to light in 1976 in outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in Zaire and Sudan where humans were believed to have contracted it from monkeys.
The Ebola Reston strain is known to be capable of non-human transmission by air, research indicates.
Ebola is the common term for a group of viruses belonging to genus Ebolavirus which causes Ebola hemorrhagic fever. The virus is named after the Ebola River in Africa where the first recognised outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever occurred.
Ebola virus has been blamed for deaths of Western Lowland Gorillas in Central Africa. In 2005, three species of fruit bat have been identified as carrying the virus but not showing disease symptoms.
Ebola hemorrhagic fever is potentially lethal and encompasses a range of symptoms including fever, vomiting, diarrhea, generalized pain or malaise, and sometimes internal and external bleeding, although the cause of death is usually due to hypovolemic shock or organ failure.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classifies Ebola virus as a biosafety level 4 agent, as well as a Category A bioterrorism agent with a “potential to be weaponized for use in biological warfare”.
