Ebola Virus Confirmed to Be Sexually Transmitted Disease -STD

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A team of scientists recently published a study explaining how the deadly Ebola virus can survive for up to nine months in sperm. Then along came medical researchers with the US Army who released another paper detailing the world's first case of sexually transmitted Ebola.

So, there you have it, Ebola is now officially a sexually transmitted disease. Admittedly, this means of transmission is not a common occurrence - just the one case described by US Army specialists has so far been documented - but it can happen, and now health officials have some very delicate guidelines amending to tend to.

How Ebola was confirmed to be an STD

The US Army medical experts who identified and recorded the first known case of sexually transmitted Ebola published their study detailing this occurrence in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The incident involved a woman who was diagnosed with the deadly disease earlier this year, in March. At first, the doctors who treated her looked for obvious infection sources, such as contact with an Ebola patient in an advanced stage of the disease.

When they couldn't figure out how and when she had been exposed to the virus, they further questioned the patient and learned that, prior to falling ill, she had been intimate with an Ebola survivor.

The man had been declared healthy back in October 2014, months before the woman got sick. All the same, when the research team tested his sperm, they discovered traces of the deadly virus.

The genetic profile of the Ebola virus retrieved from the woman's partner was shown to bear a striking resemblance to the strain making her sick. Hence, the specialists concluded that the woman had been infected via unprotected intimate relations.

?Ebola virus genomes assembled from the patient's blood and the survivor's semen were consistent with direct transmission,? said scientist Jason Ladner with the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in an interview.