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. 2019 Mar 4;8(1):15.
doi: 10.1186/s40249-019-0525-9.

HIV prevalence in suspected Ebola cases during the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone

William J Liu  1   2 , Hai-Yang Hu  3   4 , Qiu-Dong Su  5   4 , Zhe Zhang  6   4 , Yang Liu  5   4 , Yu-Lan Sun  7   4 , Xian-Da Yang  8   4 , Da-Peng Sun  9   4 , Shao-Jian Cai  10   4 , Xiu-Xu Yang  6   4 , Idrissa Kamara  11   4 , Abdul Kamara  11 , Matt Lebby  11 , Brima Kargbo  11 , Patricia Ongpin  12 , Xiao-Ping Dong  5 , Yue-Long Shu  5 , Wen-Bo Xu  5 , Gui-Zhen Wu  5 , Michael Gboun  12 , George F Gao  13   14   15
Affiliations

HIV prevalence in suspected Ebola cases during the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone

William J Liu et al. Infect Dis Poverty. .

Abstract

Background: The 2014-2016 Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa was the largest outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in history. Clarifying the influence of other prevalent diseases such as human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) will help improve treatment and supportive care of patients with EVD.

Case presentation: We examined HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV) antibody prevalence among suspected EVD cases from the Sierra Leone-China Friendship Biological Safety Laboratory during the epidemic in Sierra Leone. HIV and HCV antibodies were tested in 678 EVD-negative samples by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. A high HIV prevalence (17.6%) and low HCV prevalence (0.22%) were observed among the suspected cases. Notably, we found decreased HIV positive rates among the suspected cases over the course of the epidemic. This suggests a potentially beneficial effect of an improved public health system after assistance from the World Health Organization and other international aid organizations.

Conclusions: This EVD epidemic had a considerable impact on the public health system and influenced the prevalence of HIV found among suspected cases in Sierra Leone, but also provided an opportunity to establish a better surveillance network for infectious diseases.

Keywords: Ebola; HCV; HIV; Prevalence; Sierra Leone.

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Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

All manipulations of human samples were approved by the Sierra Leone Ethics and Scientific Review Committee, Directorate of Training and Research, Ministry of Health and Sanitation. The study was conducted in accordance with the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki and the standards of Good Clinical Practice (as defined by the International Conference on Harmonization).

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The prevalence of HIV among EBOV-negative EVD-suspected cases tested at Sierra Leone-China Friendship Biological Safety Laboratory, Sierra Leone, 2015. After its establishment in early 2015, the Sierra Leone-China Friendship Biological Safety Laboratory was responsible for EBOV testing of EVD-suspected patients from most districts of the country. From March to November 2015, 678 individuals were excluded from EBOV infection by real-time PCR method. HIV antibodies in the sera were tested using ELISA (with kits from Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise Co., Ltd., Beijing, China, and positive cases were confirmed using kits from Zhuhai Livzon Diagnostics Inc., Zhuhai, China). The significant decreases (P < 0.001 in Chi-square tests) in HIV prevalence ratio among the Ebola RNA negative suspected Ebola cases in each month are shown as brown lines and diamond symbols. The monthly reported number of Ebola cases in Sierra Leone by the WHO are shown as blue lines and diamond symbols (http://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.ebola-sitrep.ebola-summary-latest?lang=en) and were significantly correlated with the reported monthly number of Ebola cases (r = 0.745, P = 0.034) using Pearson’s correlation coefficient analyses. EBOV: Ebola virus; EVD: Ebola virus disease; PCR: Polymerase chain reaction; ELISA: Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay
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