Who Had Chinese Ebola Hamsters on Their 2024 Bingo Card?

Who Had Chinese Ebola Hamsters on Their 2024 Bingo Card?

The last time we reported on the deadly hemorrhagic disease Ebola, 4 people in Uganda had died during a small, localized outbreak. That was back in 2022.

Historically, cases of Ebola have been confined to Africa and infections are associated with close contact with the blood and bodily fluids of those suffering from the disease.

However, it appears that Chinese have not learned their lesson about tampering with viruses…especially the potentially lethal ones. Chinese researchers have created another franken-virus with parts of Ebola in a lab, resulting in an exceptionally deadly infection that killed a group of hamsters horrifically.

A team of researchers at Hebei Medical University used a contagious disease of livestock and added a protein found in Ebola, which allows the virus to infect cells and spread throughout the human body.

The group of hamsters that received the lethal injection ‘developed severe systemic diseases similar to those observed in human Ebola patients,’ including multi-organ failure,’ the study shared.

One particularly horrific symptom saw the infected hamsters develop secretions in their eyes, which impaired their vision and scabbed over the surface of the eyeballs

While the experiment may spark fears of another lab leak, the researchers say their goal was to find the right animal models that can safely mimic Ebola symptoms in a lab setting.

The Chinese scientists published their findings in ScienceDirect. The researchers asset that the aim has been to reproduce the symptoms of Ebola in a laboratory so as to better understand the condition and prevent its spread.

Due to the dangers of infection, Ebola needs to be handled in a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facility and using a BSL-2 the researchers worked around this by using vesicular stomatitis virus to carry the Ebola glycoprotein. There were 10 hamsters, half male and half female, used that was three weeks old and all died bar two of the males.

The dead hamsters were found to have seen the virus spread throughout their body including the heart, brain and kidneys, with the highest levels in the liver. “Overall, this surrogate model represents a safe, effective, and economical tool for rapid preclinical evaluation of medical countermeasures against EBOV (Ebola virus) under BSL-2 conditions, which would accelerate technological advances and breakthroughs in confronting Ebola virus disease [EVD],” stated the study.

It added: “It is a sign that 3-week-old Syrian hamsters infected with VSV-EBOV/GP have the possibility of playing a role in the study of optic nerve disorders caused by EVD.”

The reason the novel coronavirus that was spread worldwide was supposedly created for was a better understanding of the deadly severe acute respiratory diseases that had been spreading since the 2003 periodically. We know how that went.

The good news is that the route of transmission of this virus still involves blood and bodily fluids.  Let’s hope the scientists don’t tamper with it farther, creating one that is airborne.

As an interesting side-note,  a new study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases shows that a promising vaccine (named rVSVΔG-ZEBOV-GP) can cut Ebola mortality numbers in half.

The vaccine is typically administered to those at highest risk of exposure to the virus — a strategy called ring vaccination that targets “people who are contacts of an Ebola case, contacts of contacts and health-care workers,” says [Rebecca Coulborn, an epidemiologist with Epicentre, the medical research arm of Doctors Without Borders]. The vaccine is not yet commercially available.

Researchers showed that rVSVΔG-ZEBOV-GP was highly effective at reducing the risk of infection, but no one knew how capable it was of preventing death in someone who was vaccinated after becoming infected during an epidemic. This is what Coulborn and her colleagues set out to determine.

They focused their efforts on the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, which took place in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2018 and 2020. Despite the outbreak flaring up in the midst of an active conflict zone, meticulous records were kept.

“Every single Ebola health facility across the entire Ebola epidemic had a standardized, harmonized and compiled list of all admissions,” says Coulborn. This list included 2,279 confirmed Ebola patients, and it recorded whether or not each person had been vaccinated before they got sick — and if so, when they’d received the vaccine. Coulborn then compared how those two groups fared. The result was striking.

Among the unvaccinated, mortality was 56%. But for those who’d received the vaccine, that rate was cut in half.

Let’s hope rVSVΔG-ZEBOV-GP truly works better than the covid vaccines, then.

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