disables the body's ability to battle infections in a discovery that
should help the search for potential cures and vaccines.
A group of scientists in the United States found that Ebola carries a
protein called VP24 that interferes with a molecule called interferon,
which is vital to the immune response.
"One of the key reasons that Ebola virus is so deadly is because it
disrupts the body's immune response to the infection," said Chris
Basler of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, who
worked on the study. "Figuring out how VP24 promotes this disruption
will suggest new ways to defeat the virus."
The team, lead by Gaya Amarasinghe from Washington University School
of Medicine, found that VP24 works by stopping something called
"transcription factor STAT1" - which carries interferon's antiviral
message - from entering the nucleus of a cell and initiating an immune
response.
"This study shows just how nefarious the Ebola virus can be," said Ben
Neuman, a virologist at Britain's university of Reading who was not
directly involved in this study.
"Ebola virus carries a small tool that intercepts the cell's distress
signals, and when this happens, it disables some of the most useful
machinery that our bodies have for fighting Ebola. That leaves the
body with only crude defences that are less effective at stopping the
virus, and end up causing much of the damage that can eventually lead
to death."
Ebola is one of the most deadly diseases known in humans and has a
case fatality rate of up to 90 percent. In the current epidemic in
West Africa, the virus has infected more than 1,800 people. So far,
1,013 of these have died the vast majority in Guinea, Liberia and
Sierra Leone.
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