Ebola Found In Doctor's Eye After Months Of Recovery

                

After working as a doctor in an Ebola-stricken nation, Ian Crozier felt like he had something in his left eye. He was right: a live, replicating reservoir of the Ebola virus.

New York Times report that, Ian contracted the virus while working with the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone in late 2014. By October, his symptoms had abated and his blood tested negative for the virus, so he left Emory University Hospital to go home. 

Two months later, he was back. He described his symptoms to fellow physicians: his eye burned, he was sensitive to light, his vision, normally 20/15, had changed to 20/20 (by the height of the inflammation, it had blurred to 20/400), and he had the sensation of something in his eye. The pressure inside his left eye was much higher than normal, which threatened his vision. Doctors diagnosed Crozier with uveitis, a severe inflammation in the eye, but when they sampled his aqueous humor (the fluid inside the eye), they were shocked by the cause of the inflammation: Ebola.

Tests revealed that the virus wasn’t present in Crozier’s tears or on the outer surface of his eye, just lurking inside it. His eye had become a reservoir for the virus. Viral reservoirs happen when a virus finds its way into a part of the body that is usually pretty isolated from the immune system. Once there, the virus goes on replicating, but it usually doesn’t spill over to the rest of the body, since reservoirs are, by definition, isolated from the rest of the body. It’s like finding the only quiet room at a party and deciding to just hang out there, except that you’re filling the room with a deadly virus.

 The eyes are shielded from the immune system, because immune responses like inflammation could do serious damage to the delicate mechanisms of vision. This makes the eyes an ideal reservoir location. The testes are similarly protected, and researchers think that’sthe reason why the virus can leave in the semen too.

In Crozier’s case, after treatment with an experimental anti-viral drug and steroids to fight the inflammation, the Ebolavirus in his eyes finally cleared up, three months after he first reported his symptoms.