Ebola's "super-spreader" event infected 14 women at a funeral

Outbreak in Sierra Leone Is Tied to Single Funeral Where 14 Women Were Infected

Excerpt:

Sierra Leone’s explosion of Ebola cases in early summer appears to stem from one traditional healer’s funeral at which 14 women were infected, according to scientists studying the blood of victims. The funeral, which took place in mid-May, constitutes a “super-spreader” event comparable to one in 2003 in a Hong Kong hotel in which one doctor from China dying of SARS infected nine other guests who spread the virus throughout the city and to Vietnam and Canada. The funeral was in Koindu, a diamond-mining town across the border from Guéckédou in Guinea, where the outbreak is thought to have begun in December, and the healer was known for treating victims of a mysterious illness that turned out to be Ebola. The funeral’s central role, which local doctors had anecdotally suspected, was confirmed by geneticists at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard who sequenced the virus found in 78 patients treated at Kenema Government Hospital in northeastern Sierra Leone, near the borders with Liberia and Guinea, two countries that are also at the heart of the outbreak.  ... “It’s frightening that a single event could catalyze a whole outbreak, but that’s what it looks like happened,” said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a renowned virus hunter at Columbia University, who called the study “a really nice piece of work.” The scientists not only found that all 78 had virus traceable to funeral guests, but also showed that the West African Ebola strain was quite different from a strain that has been circulating thousands of miles away in Central Africa since 1976, and that the two probably diverged as far back as 2004.

Comment: Image source. Information on Koindu Sierra Leone