Tissue samples for Ebola Reston brought to local, US disease control bodies

Business World
Vol. XXII, No. 118
Friday, January 16, 2009 | MANILA, PHILIPPINES

ANIMAL AND public health experts are awaiting the results of tests by the Health department and the United States’ Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) on the emergence of the Ebola Reston virus in local hogs, an official of the 22-man mission said.

"[Blood and tissue] samples are being analyzed at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine [of the Health department] and at the CDC in US. We are still waiting for the results probably in one or two weeks," Mario Musa, communications officer of the Crisis Management Center of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said in an interview Wednesday night.

The samples, taken from hog farms in the towns of Pandi in Bulacan province and Manaoag in Pangasinan province where tissue samples of infected hogs suspectedly came from, were shipped to the US on Tuesday, Mr. Musa said.

Ebola Reston, a sub-type of the virulent Ebola in Africa, was first discovered in the Philippines in 1989 among crab-eating macaques being exported to the Hazleton Laboratories in Reston, Virginia.

Late in October, the Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory of the US Department of Agriculture reported to the Agriculture department that six out of 28 pig tissue samples taken from four different hog farms in May, June and September were positive for the virus.

Experts from the World Health Organization, World Organization for Animal Health, FAO, and Agriculture and Health departments are expected to end the 10-day joint mission today.

The team will discuss with the Health and Agriculture department the recommendation, funding and future missions when the report is finished, Mr. Musa said.

Ebola reston, which is only found in the Philippines, had been confined to monkeys and the latest detection is the first time it has jumped species. — Neil Jerome C. Morales