Do Ebola Patients Bleed?
October 9, 2014; Posted by: WeBleed staff
Recent outbreak has doctors questioning why some patients are not bleeding from virus.
According to an article today by Laura Geggel via Yahoo News, bleeding from the nose and mouth, more commonly known as hemorrhagic syndrome, are symptoms in cases of people with the ebola virus. With the recent outbreak, it has been somewhat of a mystery to doctors why some people have experienced this bleeding and others have not.
“Cases with bleeding are “usually quite severe and dramatic,” Angela Rasmussen, a research assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Washington, told Live Science. “But many Ebola cases don’t have that feature. And that feature only presents in the very late stages of the disease.”
According to the CDC, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have more than 7,400 people who have become infected and more than 3,400 have died since the outbreak began in early 2014. Nigeria also had a cluster of 20 cases, and Senegal, Spain and the United States have each reported one Ebola case. The relatively low prevalence of hemorrhagic syndrome in the current outbreak may explain why the outbreak remained under the radar for a time before it was recognized.
It takes anywhere from five to eight days for hemorrhagic syndrome to develop, according to the article, and After this amount of time, patients have very low levels of clotting factors and have a higher tendency to bleed.
Photo Credit – Daily Tech
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