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The 2014 Ebola virus epidemic in Guinea refers to the start of the first ever outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa. The epidemic began with a 2 year-old boy and subsequently spread through Guinea and four other West African countries, including Senegal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.
Epidemiology
Liberia in yellow
Index case
Epidemiologists from the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin performed the trace-back analysis and believe that the index case was a 2-year-old boy in the village of Meliandou, Guéckédou. The child fell ill on December 2, 2013 and died December 6, 2013. It is believed the child may have contracted the virus through contact with a fruit bat. His sister fell ill next, followed by his mother and grandmother. It is believed the Ebola virus was then spread to the villages of Dandou Pombo and Dawa, both in Guéckédou, by the midwife who attended them. From Dawa village the virus spread to Guéckédou Baladou District and Guéckédou Farako District, and on to Macenta and Kissidougou.
The virus then spread to Sierra Leone when 14 mourners at a traditional healer's funeral became infected. It is believed the healer had been to Guinea, possibly to treat the family of the index case. The funeral was in Koindu, a diamond-mining town across the border from Guéckédou in Guinea.
Virology
Phylogenetic analysis indicates this strain of Ebola virus is linked to the Zaire ebolavirus lineage that has caused outbreaks in Central Africa in the past, including the first outbreak in Zaire (now Republic of Congo) and the Sudan in 1976, and does not represent the emergence of a divergent and endemic virus in Guinea.
Genome sequencing by researchers from Harvard and the Broad Institute in Boston Masschusetts, using samples taken in Sierra Leone, revealed that the outbreak originated with a single transmission from an animal to a human in Guinea. This means that all subsequent infections were due to human-to-human transmission. It also shows that this lineage, which first emerged in humans in 2013, diverged from other variants of Ebola in 2004. l Pardis Sabeti, the lead investigator, said, “No one knows where it’s been during that time." She added that it might have circulated in some combination of bats, apes or other forest animals, “or it could have been circulating in humans for 10 years with little or no notice.”
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