Ebola is Persisting In Survivors

Pauline Cafferkey has had a re-emergence.

Pauline Cafferkey, 39, is in a ‘serious condition’ at the Royal Free Hospital in London after the RAF flew her down from Glasgow this morning.

Her second bout of Ebola came ten days after she received a Pride of Britain award from Lenny Henry and Carol Vorderman and met Samantha Cameron in Downing Street the following day.

Miss Cafferkey is now back in the isolation unit where she spent a month and became critically ill after being diagnosed with Ebola last December.

All this time, this has been cooking in her, periodically throwing out mutations, and seeing which ones are better at evading or countering the human immune response. Notice this has now risen in an individual who was, for practical purposes, immunized against it.

If this has evolved to become a chronic low-level infection, the turning point will be if it will find its way into the gay population and spread wildly. Already we know it retreats into the testes, and can be found in semen long after symptoms have resolved. We know a similar plant virus, Pepper Mild Mottle Virus can actually survive ingestion, make it to the large intestine, and then replicate in stool, presumably using bacterial genetic machinery to reproduce. Once Ebola makes to to the gays, it will begin trolling in the victims for better ways to bypass the human immune system and spread more easily. The more it cooks, the more dangerous it can become.

This also highlights that even though they say Africa is now officially Ebola-free, it may not be, and if so, the few cases that will pop up in the coming year may be a stronger version, better able to evade the immune system.

Apocalypse cometh™