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NEW YORK. – Only a day after the World Health Organisation announced that an end was in sight for the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, scientists had less uplifting news: The virus may be mutating.

“The response to the EVD (Ebola virus disease) epidemic has now moved to a second phase, as the focus shifts from slowing transmission to ending the epidemic,” the WHO said in its latest report on the disease yesterday. There were 99 confirmed new cases last week, the lowest number since June.

But researchers at the Institut Pasteur, the French medical-research organisation that first identified the outbreak in Guinea last March, said that they’re trying to determine whether the Ebola virus is becoming more contagious.

“We know the virus is changing quite a lot,” Anavaj Sakuntabhai, the head of the Laboratory for Genetics of Human Response to Infection at the Institut Pasteur, told the BBC.

Specifically, he said, there have been a number of asymptomatic cases, meaning that infected people may unknowingly be spreading the disease: “A virus can change itself to less deadly but more contagious, and that’s something we are afraid of.” Sakuntabhai and his colleagues are currently analysing hundreds of blood samples from Guinean patients to monitor the virus’s evolution. “That’s important for diagnosing and for treatment,” he said. “We need to know how the virus (is changing) to keep up with our enemy.” – The Atlantic.