The organization on Thursday in Geneva advised all male survivors of Ebola to be tested three months after the onset of symptoms and then monthly until they know they have no risk of passing on the virus through their Fluid.
“It’s not the sex that is dangerous; it’s the Fluid that is dangerous. How people actually get exposed, in soiled linens or whatever, is not clear," Bruce Aylward, Head of the WHO’s Ebola Response said.
“Transmission through Fluid may explain why a few cases continue to occur even though the outbreak has been almost completely eradicated by an intense international effort, recently bolstered by the deployment of a trial vaccine in Guinea and Sierra Leone,’’ he said.
Aylward said that sexual transmission was “obviously not a huge risk, because if it were we would have seen a lot more in the areas that were hardest hit at the beginning of this outbreak.”
He said this could undermine the hope of ending the outbreak in West Africa by 2015.
A clinician said on condition of anonymity, that a forthcoming study in the New England Journal of Medicine, based on around 200 survivors, found that around half still had traces of the virus in their Fluid after six months.
“The old advice of three months is no longer good," he said.
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