Ebola is a deadly hemorrhagic disease caused by a virus that is endemic in parts of East-Central and West Africa. Most people are aware that a primary route for person-to-person transmission is through contact with bodily fluids from an infected person. But more recent outbreaks, including the 2013–2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, demonstrated that infectious Ebola virus (EBOV) is also found on the skin’s surface of those who have succumbed to infection or at late times during infection.
Although evidence suggests that EBOV can be passed on from skin contact with a person in the later stages of the disease, very little is known about how the virus makes its way out of the body and onto the skin’s surface.
Researchers at University of Iowa Health Care and colleagues at Texas Biomedical Research Institute and Boston University have traced a cellular route the virus uses to traverse the inner and outer layers of skin and emerge onto the skin’s surface.
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