Experts have urged male survivors of ebola to adhere to clinical tests after discharge, noting that the ebola virus has been found to stay in semen for over a year, which could lead to the spread of ebola virus to their partners.
The call was made by Ivan Kimuli, a Physician by training and a clinical/research fellow at Makerere University’s Lung Institute, during the training of journalists on reporting of ebola in Kampala.
Kimuli revealed that when the medical team carries out tests on ebola patients and doesn’t find ebola in the male patient’s blood and these haven’t possessed any symptoms of the virus for 72 hours before discharge, they are allowed to go back home but are urged to have protected sex until similar negative tests are detected in their semen.
“Ebola virus establishes itself in the testes and it stays there in what we call the latent mode, so that latency in the testes is going to make a man produce semen that has virus for a very long time after discharge. This time would vary between three months after discharge, I think the longest a person who disseminated the virus in semen is for over one year,” said Kimuli.
He then urged male ebola survivors who have been discharged to always adhere to clinical follow up and test the semen to a point where health workers find two consecutive negative for ebola on the survivors’ semen.
Kimuli added, “And in that process, you could actually spread the virus to your sexual partner through unprotected sex. Make sure that when you discharge them, you counsel them about this and encourage them to practice protected sex, we actually give them condoms, if they get finished, we encourage them to come back until you have two negative tests is when you will be comfortable to have unprotected sex because the risk of transmission exists post recovery.”
As for the breastfeeding mothers, Kimuli said that a similar test is carried out on the breast milk so as to protect their infants from catching the deadly virus.
“If you are a female and you were breastfeeding or lactating at that time, there could be some residual ebola virus that could be still in the breast milk. So for mothers, we try to express this milk regularly to see to it that it gets free from ebola virus because over time, the virus is going to go down, so it is until we find two negative tests of ebola in the breast milk that is when we encourage the mother to breast feed if they want or be supported to feed the child in another way,” added Kimuli.
The development comes at the time the Ministry of Health indicated that as at 25th October 2022, Uganda has recorded 34 cases of people who have recovered from the ebola virus following an outbreak in September, while 28 people have lost their lives while 33 people are in admission out of the 95 confirmed cases so far.
