Thousands of Ebola survivors Suffering from Joint Pain, Probable Blindness

Their health is now the new emergency.

Global health experts said on Friday that thousands of Ebola survivors who were infected by the virus but survived the ordeal are now suffering from conditions like eye inflammation which could possibly lead to blindness, joint pain and other ailments.

Twenty-five percent of the survivors are enduring inflammation, altered vision and in some rare instances, blindness according to Bausch. These health issues could become worse, experts say.

Some survivors, like Yusuf Kabba, who caught the virus at the height of the outbreak last year, said that he is still suffering from what he experience firsthand.

“The world has by no means seen such a big quantity of survivors from an Ebola outbreak”, stated Anders Nordstrom, a WHO consultant in Sierra Leone who took half in a five-day convention this week about Ebola survivors.

Survivors also talked about the challenges they still face, including emotional trauma, joint pain and vision problems.

The WHO also reportedly said that Ebola survivors were subjected to less assessable but equally grave long-term problems, such as a spike in depression rates, post-traumatic stress disorder and social exclusion. “This is new – both from a medical and from a societal point of view”, he told reporters on a telebriefing.

Ebola has claimed around 11,300 lives since late 2013, almost 4,000 of them in Sierra Leone.

Nordstrom noted that in the hard-hit Sierra Leone district of Kenema – where there are hundreds of survivors – “we have not seen one single case of sexual transmission”.

Previous outbreaks have been so small that it was hard to pin down the consequences faced by survivors, he noted, although “small numbers of case reports” have pinpointed the eye and joint problems.

It is been determined the Ebola virus remains in the body’s fluids, like blood and vomit no longer than 21 days.

Scientists are not shocked that a virus as devastating as Ebola would have lingering effects and the situation in West Africa provides them with a chance to educate themselves on how to aid survivors.