LONDON—A growing awareness of how the Ebola virus can hide in parts of the body such as eyes, breasts and testicles long after leaving the bloodstream raises questions about whether the disease can ever be beaten.

Virologists said Friday’s case of a Scottish nurse, Pauline Cafferkey, who had recovered from Ebola but is now suffering complications adds to signs that the virus is a long-term health risk and can lead to a “post-Ebola syndrome.”

Cafferkey, 39, was transferred from the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow to an isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London early on Friday morning, the Royal Free said in a statement. She was the first person to have been diagnosed with Ebola on British soil. She was discharged in January after seemingly making a full recovery.

The hospital said in the statement it had “identified a small number of close contacts … that we will be following up as a precaution”, but added: “The risk to the general public remains low.”

“Over the past few years there has been mounting evidence of mental and physical health problems in Ebola survivors that can last for years after the virus is cleared from the bloodstream,” said Ben Neuman, an Ebola expert and lecturer in virology at Britain’s University of Reading. “The newly discovered twist on this post-Ebola syndrome is that in some cases the health problems – often including damage to the eyes and joints – are caused by live Ebola virus growing in fluids in some of the less accessible compartments of the body.”

Ebola, one of the deadliest viruses known in humans, infected 28,000 people and killed more than 11,300 of them in an unprecedented outbreak in West Africa which was declared in March 2014 and is only now coming under control. Partly because of the vast numbers involved in the epidemic, which centered on Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, infectious disease experts say we are learning more every day about Ebola from cases such as Cafferkey’s and thousands more survivors.

Ebola experts said in August that around half of Ebola survivors in West Africa were already reporting suffering from chronic problems, including serious joint pain and eye inflammation that can lead to blindness.

Large Virus Reservoir?

“Due to the sheer scale of this outbreak compared to previous ones we are going to see aspects of Ebola virus infection that we have not observed before,” said Julian Hiscox, a professor of infection and global health at Britain’s Liverpool University.