Indonesia: Ebola and Marburg virus found in Kalimantan?s orangutan - or not?

[Gert van der Hoek]

See also: Serological evidence of ebola virus infection in indonesian orangutans


Ebola virus found in Kalimantan’s orangutan

Indra Harsaputra, The Jakarta Post, Surabaya | National | Fri, November 02

Researchers from Airlangga University’s Avian Influenza-zoonosis Research Center in Surabaya, East Java, report that they have detected evidence of Ebola virus in several orangutans in Kalimantan.

Researcher Chairil Anwar Nidom told The Jakarta Post on Friday that 65 serum samples collected from 353 healthy orangutans between December 2005 and December 2006 tested positive for Ebola virus.

“The result should be an early warning for us,” he said.

“In 2006, we collected the samples and froze them because we didn’t have an appropriate laboratory to examine them. We examined them last year,” he added.

Chairil also said that six of 353 samples tested positive for Marburg virus, the similar virus to Ebola that causes Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever.

Further examination, Chairil said, showed that 60 of 65 Ebola-tested samples were similar to the virus found in Africa. “There were only five samples that had the similarity with Ebola virus found in Asia. The other 60 were similar to the Ebola virus found in Zaire, Sudan, Ivory Coast, and Bundibugyo district in Uganda,” he said.

According to Chairil, Ebola virus might still live in some of orangutans’ bodies.

“All I can say is that Ebola could be a threat to humans living in Indonesia,” he said.

The orangutan is only found in Kalimantan and Sumatra. The other great apes: gorilla, chimpanzee and bonobo live in Africa.

Chairil and his team said they would continue the research. “We are currently collecting samples from wild boars, which we suspect transmit the virus to orangutans,” he said.

Ebola virus was first detected in Congo in 1976. Sixteen people were killed in the last Ebola outbreak in Uganda this year.

Jakarta Post

thanks to Crawford Kilian

Full article in PlosOne

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[alert]

Re: Indonesia: Ebola and Marburg virus found in Kalimantan?s orangutan

Re: Indonesia: Ebola and Marburg virus found in Kalimantan?s orangutan

Published Date: 2012-11-07 20:34:53
Subject: PRO/AH/EDR> Filoviruses - Indonesia (02): (KA) orangutans, clarification
Archive Number: 20121107.1397850

FILOVIRUSES - INDONESIA (02): (KALIMATAN) ORANGUTANS, CLARIFICATION
*******************************************************************
A ProMED-mail post
http://www.promedmail.org
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
http://www.isid.org

Date: Wed 6 Nov 2012
Source: The Jakarta post [edited]
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/11/06/your-letters-no-evidence-ebola-orangutans.html


The article on The Jakarta Post website on 2 Nov 2012 titled Ebola virus found in Kalimantan's orangutan is highly misleading.

The article states that Nidom and his colleagues have "detected evidence of Ebola virus in several orangutans in Kalimantan," and that "65 out of 353 orangutans tested positive for Ebola virus."

Both statements are untrue.

Anyone can check the original research article, which is freely available online in the open access journal PLOS ONE, to verify that neither the Ebola nor Marburg virus have been detected in orangutans.

The paper only tells us that the tested animals [had] antibodies that react with the Ebola virus. As no viruses (or actually filoviruses) were detected, we cannot know whether the antibody positive animals are also virus positive, and thus potentially a reservoir for the disease.

It is important to note that the findings in the paper could also be explained by exposure to some other pathogen that induces cross-reacting antibodies with Ebola.

In short, we repeat, we do not know whether orangutans have Ebola or Marburg.

These scientific nuances matter greatly. As scientists, we should always ensure that we honestly tell what our research findings indicate. Regrettably, the Post article crosses the line between objective, scientific reporting and unsubstantiated scaremongering.

Of course, we need to be careful. If orangutans do have dangerous Ebola or Marburg-like diseases, this should be researched and reported to ensure that the public is informed about possible health risks, and necessary steps can then be taken by the authorities to prevent the disease from spreading.

As long as we do not know this for sure, we should stick to the facts.

As an orangutan conservation scientist, I am concerned. Orangutans are frequently killed in both Kalimantan and Sumatra for a range of reasons. If the news that orangutans have Ebola spreads through local media, it might very well increase the incidence of orangutan killings. People might not just consider orangutans a nuisance species that affects their crops but a potential risk to their lives and take action. The conservation implications of this inaccurate reporting could, therefore, be serious.

We plead with Nidom and his colleagues to clarify their findings -- what they know and what they don't know -- so that the public and authorities are accurately and objectively informed.

[Byline: Erik Meijaard and Serge Wich]

--
Communicated by:
ProMED-mail from HealthMap alerts
<promed@promedmail.org>

[The paper referred to can be accessed here:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0040740.

Evidence indicates that bats are the reservoirs for Filoviridae viruses such as Ebola and Marburg. These viruses can be lethal to primates (including humans) and other mammals. As the authors of the article above say, the antibodies found might indicate cross-reaction with other Filoviridae. This is especially likely given the occurrence outside of Africa. In any case, the finding raises concern for the conservation of these apes.

The interactive HealthMap/ProMED map of the affected area is available at: http://healthmap.org/r/3Z3m. - Mod.PMB]

[The paper concerned is extensively quoted in the previous posting in this thread (see below). Ebolaviruses include a serotype called Ebola-Reston, which is not known to cause human disease, and which originated in the Philippines, next door to the Indonesian state of Kalimantan on the island of Borneo and is part of the same ecosystem -- see map at:
<

But the highest antibody titers found were against African ebolaviruses, indicating a closer relationship of the agent producing those antibodies to them rather than to Reston. But a Reston-like virus with low patogenicity for primates could explain both the absence of reports of hemorrhagic fever cases in hunters butchering orang-utans, and the survival of such a relatively high proportion of the sparse orang-utan population. See ProMED archives below.

 

[Emily]

Re: Indonesia: Ebola and Marburg virus found in Kalimantan?s orangutan - or not?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22465-orangutans-infected-by-mystery-ebolalike-virus.html?cmpid=RSS|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL|online-news

Orang-utans infected by mystery Ebola-like virus

13:23 06 November 2012 by Debora MacKenzie
[snip]
Or perhaps whatever the orang-utans caught wasn't quite African Ebola. "There could be filoviruses in nature that do not cause disease in primates," notes Thomas Geisbert, an Ebola expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Antibodies to African Ebola might cross-react with those viruses, and give a positive test. But without an actual virus and its genetic sequence, says Geisbert, "I don't think you can say for sure that any virus associated with antibodies in these animals is the same as the African filoviruses"...

 

[alert]

Re: Indonesia: Ebola and Marburg virus found in Kalimantan?s orangutan - or not?

We have a thread that indicates that large numbers of humans elsewhere in Africa have antibodies to Ebola:

http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=140906

So it is likely that there is at least one (and maybe more) other virus that is not pathogenic, or only mildly pathogenic, in both humans and non-human primates but induces antibodies to the highly pathogenic Ebola and Marburg viruses.

If such a virus could be isolated, it could be used as a vaccine for Ebola, much as the cowpox virus was used as a smallpox vaccine.

 

[Emily]

Re: Indonesia: Ebola and Marburg virus found in Kalimantan?s orangutan - or not?

The new article Shiloh posted offers a theory that there might be long-held genetic resistance to Ebola and Lassa in some areas, too.

http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=194840

 

[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Indonesia: Ebola and Marburg virus found in Kalimantan?s orangutan - or not?

Serological Evidence of Ebola Virus Infection in Indonesian Orangutans

Epub 2012 Jul 18

Abstract


Ebola virus (EBOV) and Marburg virus (MARV) belong to the family Filoviridae and cause severe hemorrhagic fever in humans and nonhuman primates. Despite the discovery of EBOV (Reston virus) in nonhuman primates and domestic pigs in the Philippines and the serological evidence for its infection of humans and fruit bats, information on the reservoirs and potential amplifying hosts for filoviruses in Asia is lacking. In this study, serum samples collected from 353 healthy Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) in Kalimantan Island, Indonesia, during the period from December 2005 to December 2006 were screened for filovirus-specific IgG antibodies using a highly sensitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) with recombinant viral surface glycoprotein (GP) antigens derived from multiple species of filoviruses (5 EBOV and 1 MARV species). Here we show that 18.4% (65/353) and 1.7% (6/353) of the samples were seropositive for EBOV and MARV, respectively, with little cross-reactivity among EBOV and MARV antigens. In these positive samples, IgG antibodies to viral internal proteins were also detected by immunoblotting. Interestingly, while the specificity for Reston virus, which has been recognized as an Asian filovirus, was the highest in only 1.4% (5/353) of the serum samples, the majority of EBOV-positive sera showed specificity to Zaire, Sudan, Cote d'Ivoire, or Bundibugyo viruses, all of which have been found so far only in Africa. These results suggest the existence of multiple species of filoviruses or unknown filovirus-related viruses in Indonesia, some of which are serologically similar to African EBOVs, and transmission of the viruses from yet unidentified reservoir hosts into the orangutan populations. Our findings point to the need for risk assessment and continued surveillance of filovirus infection of human and nonhuman primates, as well as wild and domestic animals, in Asia.

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[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Indonesia: Ebola and Marburg virus found in Kalimantan?s orangutan - or not?

Further reading found that there are wild pigs and 4 species of bats!

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