Ebola Virus: How To Survive An Ebola Virus Attack - People Have Been Known To Beat The Virus

Yes, the Ebola virus does not yet have a cure and those infected with the virus are more likely to die from it but there are however some people who have beaten the virus and survive the attack to tell their story.

Doctors don't know for certain who will survive Ebola but studies suggest there are some biological markers linked with a higher chance of surviving Ebola, experts say.

Ebola virus depletes the immune cells of its sufferers, these immune cells defend against infection. The virus depletes immune cells called CD4 and CD8 T Lymphocytes, which are crucial to the function of the immune system, Derek Gather, a bioinformatics researcher at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom said.

People with well developed immune systems can stand up to this initial attack – meaning their immune cells are not as depleted in the first stages of infection – then studies suggest they are more likely to survice the disease.

The patients who survive it best are the ones who don't get such a bad (immune) deficiency,”in the first place.

But if the body is not able to fend off this attack, then the immune system becomes less able to regulate itself. Gather said, leading to drop in blood pressure, multi-organ failure and eventually death.

1. So the better developed our immune systems are, the better the chance of surviving the initial attack of an Ebola attack.

2. Another marker linked with people's ability to survive Ebola is a gene called human leukocyte antigen-B, which makes a protein that is important in the immune system.Studies have found that people with certain versions of this gene, called B*07 and B*14, were more likely to survive Ebola, while people with other versions, called B*67 and B*15, were more likely to die.

And finally, some people may be resistant to Ebola infection entirely, if they have a mutation in a gene called NPC1. Studies show that, when researchers take cells from people with the NPC1 mutation and try to infect them with Ebola in a laboratory dish, these cells are resistant to the virus.

The good news is, people in Europe have been known to purpose this mutation, in fact 1 in 300 to 1 in 400 people have this mutation. It even more common in some populations, in Nova Scotia, between 10 and 26 percent of people have this mutation.

The bad new however is, in African populations the figure of those who have this mutation is not known, Gatherer said.

Gatherer is hoping that, samples will be collected in the current outbreak so that researchers can conduct studies to better understand the virus and how to survive it, since the studies on Ebola resistance was done in a lab, and it's not known for certain if carriers of the NPC1 are truly resistance to Ebola.

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This surely will give hope to so many. I do hope that samples of those who have died in these countries have been collected to help with research that would most certainly save the lives of those still living and others in the future.