Nonlethal Ebola strain found in PH monkeys

The Department of Health on Saturday confirmed that monkeys in a research and breeding facility in the country had been infected with an Ebola virus strain that it said was nonlethal to humans.

Health Secretary Janette Garin said the Ebola Reston Virus (ERV) that had infected some of the 301 monkeys in the unnamed facility was of little or no threat to healthy adults.

“The ERV that struck the monkeys can be transmitted to humans without resulting in illness. The threat to human health is likely to be low, or none for healthy adults,” she told an emergency press conference yesterday.

Garin said the virus was detected last week after the monkeys were observed to be suffering from measles, which could have lowered their resistance to Ebola.

She said the facility’s 25 workers have tested negative for ERV antibodies after their blood samples were sent to the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine using the method Elisa, or enzyme immunosorbent assay.

Garin provided scant details, and did not identify the facility, the location or whether the monkeys were being bred for export to foreign laboratories. Meanwhile, the monkeys will continue to be observed, she said.

“There are many forms of Ebola, and ERV is the tamest type of virus to healthy humans. Some Ebola virus have a tremendous effect on animals, but not much on humans. This is a possible case of ERV,” she said.

She said ERV was different from the deadly Ebola-Zaire strain that infected 759 people and killed 467 in Zaire, West Africa. By August 2015, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa recorded 28,000 cases with 11,302 deaths worldwide.

Garin said that authorities at the World Health Organization (WHO), which has a regional office in Manila, had been informed.

The Ebola virus has five subtypes. The Zaire, Sudan, Bundibugyo subtypes are associated with deadly hemorrhagic fever in humans. The Cote d’Ivoire and Reston subtypes are not, according to WHO.

According to Dr. Rubina Cresencio, acting director of the Bureau of Animal Industry, the local Ebola strain may have come from the monkey’s interaction with bats.

Garin said it was possible that “the outbreak of measles in humans in this facility may have probably pulled down the immune system and resistance of some monkeys who already had the virus.”

“That’s why it is very important that our elementary students get their vaccine and booster doses, since we can see that even animals get infected when people get sick,” she said.

The DOH and the Department of Agriculture are conducting a thorough study and investigation on where the virus came from and how and to what extent the virus has affected the animals, said Garin.

The full report and result of the sequencing that determines the nature of the virus conducted by Japan and Australia will be released next week, she said.

It was the latest reported Ebola infection in mammals in the Philippines since December 2008, when pigs tested positive for the virus at a hog farm in Bulacan. About 6,000 pigs were culled in early 2009 to prevent the spread of the virus.

The first reported Ebola-infected monkeys from the Philippines were found at a research laboratory in Reston, Virginia, where dozens of them died in 1989.

In 1996, monkeys that originated from the Philippines were found with Ebola

Reston at a laboratory in Alice, Texas. About 600 monkeys at the Philippine breeding facility were killed to control the spread of the virus before the facility was shut down. Jodee A. Agoncillo and AP