Comments on: Understanding the Emergence of Ebola Virus Disease in Sierra Leone: Stalking the Virus in the Threatening Wake of Emergence http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/understanding-the-emergence-of-ebola-virus-disease-in-sierra-leone-stalking-the-virus-in-the-threatening-wake-of-emergence/ Sun, 17 Sep 2017 16:02:25 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.3 By: Christian L. Althaus http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/understanding-the-emergence-of-ebola-virus-disease-in-sierra-leone-stalking-the-virus-in-the-threatening-wake-of-emergence/#comment-2356 Wed, 22 Apr 2015 22:58:31 +0000 http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/?post_type=article&p=56890#comment-2356 Thank you for this excellent study describing the early transmission events of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone.

You report that the suspected primary case (traditional healer) became extremely ill on April 28. Given that symptoms might have started a few days before, this date confirms our estimate of the date of onset of symptoms in the primary case (April 23, 95% CI 19-25 Apr). See http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/estimating-the-reproduction-number-of-zaire-ebolavirus-ebov-during-the-2014-outbreak-in-west-africa/ for more details.

The date is also in striking agreement with the estimated time of the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) in the genome analysis by Gire et al. (Science, 2014:345(6202):1369-72).

This illustrates nicely how epidemiological contact tracing, mathematical modeling and phylogenetic analyses can complement each other during outbreak investigations.

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