Ebola: CDC Head Thomas Frieden sounds the alarm!

[armadillo]

Let us keep this young nurse, and her dog, in our thoughts.

 

http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ebola-feature.jpg?w=720&h=480&crop=1

[Guest]

Having a transmission to someone who had every precaution available to her, and who was medically knowledgeable about the dangers. Now if that isn't scary, I don't know what is... If it could happen to her, what chance is there for Joe Blow in the street?

[armadillo]

Having a transmission to someone who had every precaution available to her, and who was medically knowledgeable about the dangers. Now if that isn't scary, I don't know what is... If it could happen to her, what chance is there for Joe Blow in the street?

 

How'd you like to be one of the "Joe Blow's" that the CDC is now tracking down?

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/10/15/ebola-stricken-nurse-flew-on-a-passenger-plane-a-day-before-being-diagnosed/

[+ Chris Eisenhower]

How'd you like to be one of the "Joe Blow's" that the CDC is now tracking down?

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/10/15/ebola-stricken-nurse-flew-on-a-passenger-plane-a-day-before-being-diagnosed/

 

By the way, there's some stupid rumor being pushed around about an outbreak in a Texas town that's being quarantined. It's making its way (please note that I used "it's" and "its" correctly, Unicorn) around Facebook now, and has been reported on Snopes.com.

 

How people think this is funny is beyond me. This is how you cause a panic.

[MFLV]

Our healthcare system certainly isn't be stilling confidence in how they are handling this. They seem to be reacting rather than being proactive. What's really scary is the projections in Africa if we don't get a handle on this. I feel the need to donate some money to the fight of Ebola. I feel so bad for them. The photos I have seen online are heart wrenching.

[armadillo]

"The level of risk to people around her would be extremely low," said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

Let's revisit this in a week or so, shall we, Tom?

[MFLV]

Our healthcare system certainly isn't be stilling confidence in how they are handling this. They seem to be reacting rather than being proactive. What's really scary is the projections in Africa if we don't get a handle on this. I feel the need to donate some money to the fight of Ebola. I feel so bad for them. The photos I have seen online are heart wrenching.

 

Damn auto correct - meant to stay - instilling - not be stilling.

[armadillo]

http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/1372/5644/original.jpg

 

(CNSNews.com) - Dr. Tom Frieden, director for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said during a telephone press briefing Wednesday that you cannot get Ebola by sitting next to someone on a bus, but that infected or exposed persons should not ride public transportation because they could transmit the disease to someone else.

 

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/brittany-m-hughes/cdc-you-can-give-can-t-get-ebola-bus

[Steven_Draker]

Ebola: How to stop the disease ‘dead in its tracks’

October 20th 2014

 

It seemed like the nightmare scenario: Ebola had reached Africa’s biggest city, a chaotic and densely populated metropolis of slums and shantytowns where the virus threatened to spread to millions of people.

 

Health experts were terrified when Ebola struck Lagos in late July. They were deeply worried that it would be unstoppable in Nigeria, a rapidly urbanizing country of 170 million, far bigger than the nations where Ebola had begun. Their fears were heightened in August when the virus leaped another border and reached Senegal, another key West African country.

 

Yet today, in a remarkable display of how to beat the lethal virus, both Nigeria and Senegal have defeated their Ebola outbreaks. The World Health Organization announced on Friday that the outbreak was officially over in Senegal, and made the same declaration for Nigeria on Monday. In both countries, 42 days have passed since their last reported case – the standard rule for declaring an outbreak over, since it is twice the maximum 21-day incubation period for the virus.

 

“The most important lesson for the world at large is this: An immediate, broad-based and well-co-ordinated response can stop the Ebola virus … dead in its tracks,” the WHO said on Friday after declaring the end of the Senegal outbreak.

 

Based on the successes of Nigeria and Senegal, here are the strategies that can be adopted by other countries, including the United States and Canada, as they prepare for the threat of the virus.

 

Rapid response to the first case

 

Nigeria’s first Ebola patient, Patrick Sawyer, was initially thought to have malaria. But when malaria treatment failed at a local hospital, doctors immediately began treating him as a possible Ebola patient, and he was kept in isolation at the hospital. Officials were notified and a blood sample was rushed to a testing lab.

 

On July 23, just three days after Mr. Sawyer arrived in Lagos on an indirect flight from Liberia, the Nigerian health ministry set up an Ebola Incident Management Centre, which evolved into an Emergency Operations Centre to co-ordinate the response and the decision-making.

 

The centre took over the management of each suspected Ebola case. It investigated every possible case and supervised the decontamination of their homes. Each suspected case was isolated in a special ward of a treatment facility. Blood tests were rapidly conducted to verify if suspected cases were genuine or not.

 

Senegal, meanwhile, had been well-prepared with an Ebola response plan as early as March. It created a National Crisis Committee as the “nerve centre” for its response, and deployed its emergency plan nationwide in August, even though only a single case had been detected. “The whole country moved into a heightened state of alert,” the WHO said.

 

A rigorous and relentless system of contact-tracing

 

Nigerian health teams visited 18,500 homes in Lagos and Port Harcourt, the two cities where Ebola cases were reported, as they searched for anyone who had been in contact with the 20 Ebola patients in the country. More than 150 contact tracers were deployed.

 

The tracing teams tracked down 894 people who had been in contact with Ebola patients, and began monitoring their health closely. The WHO described it as “world-class epidemiological detective work.” Even mobile-phone data and law-enforcement agencies were employed to trace contacts, using an emergency presidential decree, and airplane manifests were scrutinized. Health workers visited any contact who reported symptoms – or who failed to provide health updates via cellphone text messages.

 

In Senegal, tracers found 74 close contacts of the country’s sole Ebola patient. The health of each of these 74 people was carefully monitored, twice a day. To encourage their co-operation, the contacts were offered food, money and psychological counselling.

 

An energetic campaign of public education

 

In Nigeria, social mobilization teams went house-to-house to visit 26,000 families who lived within two kilometres of the Ebola patients. They explained Ebola’s warning signs and how to prevent the virus from spreading. Leaflets and billboards, in multiple languages, along with social-media messages, were used to educate the broader Nigerian population.

 

Education was crucial in a country where dangerous myths were spreading. There was even a rumour that drinking large amounts of salt water would protect people from Ebola – a rumour that sickened and even killed some Nigerians who attempted the harmful diet.

 

Senegal, too, created a national public-awareness campaign, using media experts and local radio networks.

 

Effective public-health institutions

 

Senegal and Nigeria both benefited from a stronger and better-financed system of public health than Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the impoverished countries where the current epidemic began.

 

Nigeria also took advantage of the infrastructure of a polio eradication program that had been active for years. A polio and HIV clinic in Lagos, financed by the Gates Foundation, was transformed into an emergency centre for Ebola, with dozens of doctors available.

 

Nigeria was also quick to welcome foreign help. There was remarkable co-ordination between every level of Nigerian government and global health organizations such as the WHO, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Private companies donated ambulances, disinfectant and other important supplies.

 

Heightened vigilance and screening at borders, but a refusal to halt air travel

 

Nigeria and Senegal boosted their surveillance for Ebola, especially at land border crossings, but they never closed their airports.

 

“Critically important early on was the government’s decision to open a humanitarian corridor in Dakar to facilitate the movement and activities of humanitarian agencies,” the WHO said. “This decision meant that food, medicines and other essential supplies could seamlessly and efficiently flow into the country.”

 

source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/ebola-how-to-stop-the-disease-dead-in-its-tracks/article21159394/

[+ dutchmuch]

I just saw Judge Jenkins in Dallas give a news conference. Let cooler heads prevail!

[manTOman]

NY Times reports that now there's a case of ebola in NYC.

It's a doctor who came back from west Africa a week ago, and has developed symptoms Thursday morning. However, the night prior he took a subway to go bowling? What happened to the 21 day quarantine again?

Not only irresponsible but rather stupid. And he's a doctor!?!

[armadillo]

NY Times reports that now there's a case of ebola in NYC.

It's a doctor who came back from west Africa a week ago, and has developed symptoms Thursday morning. However, the night prior he took a subway to go bowling? What happened to the 21 day quarantine again?

Not only irresponsible but rather stupid. And he's a doctor!?!

 

Primum Non Nocere

 

Latin for ‘first do no harm.’ A guiding principle for physicians that, whatever the intervention or procedure, the patient’s well-being is the primary consideration

[bigvalboy]

NY Times reports that now there's a case of ebola in NYC.

It's a doctor who came back from west Africa a week ago, and has developed symptoms Thursday morning. However, the night prior he took a subway to go bowling? What happened to the 21 day quarantine again?

Not only irresponsible but rather stupid. And he's a doctor!?!

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

 

It does sell newspapers...

[Steven_Draker]

French scientists devise fast-track test for Ebola

 

A new device similar to a simple pregnancy home-test could allow doctors to diagnose a patient with suspected Ebola in under 15 minutes, its French developers said Tuesday.

 

Trials at a high-security lab have validated the technique and prototype kits should be available in Ebola-hit countries by the end of October for a clinical trial, France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) said in a statement.

 

The diagnostic tool, not yet approved by regulators, works by monoclonal antibodies reacting to the presence of virus in a tiny sample, which can be a drop of blood, plasma or urine, it said.

 

A European pharma company Vedalab is turning it into a user-friendly kit called Ebola eZYSCREEN.

 

Similar to a DIY pregnancy test, a positive result sees a small stripe showing up in a results window on the hand-held device.

 

The kit is simple to use in the field without any additional equipment, said the CEA, which also does non-nuclear research with a possible military or security application.

"It can give a result in less than 15 minutes for anyone showing symptoms of the disease," it said.

 

"Current tests, which are based on genetic detection of the virus, are highly sensitive but need special equipment, take between two and a quarter and two and a half hours and can only be carried out in a lab," the CEA explained.

 

Scientists at the agency began working on the diagnostic tool in mid-August, when the epidemic in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone worsened. The test is for the so-called Zaire ebolavirus, the strain now circulating in West Africa.

 

The achievement builds on previous Ebola research funded in part by the French defence ministry as part of its anti-bioterrorism programme.

This research had "saved more than a year" in development time of the diagnostic test, the CEA said.

 

More than 4,500 people have been killed by Ebola since the start of the year, almost all of them in west Africa.

 

The epidemic has thrown the spotlight on poor infrastructure in the three hardest-hit nations but also the lack of weapons to tackle a disease that until now had been extremely rare and claimed relatively few lives.

 

Other pharmaceutical teams are also working on fast diagnostic tools for Ebola. They include Primerdesign, a spinoff company of Britain's University of Southampton, and Corgenix Medical Corp of the United States.

 

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-10-french-scientists-fast-track-ebola.html

[Steven_Draker]

Faster Ebola Tests Could Help Stem the Outbreak in West Africa

 

http://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ebola_libieria.jpg?w=1100

 

Better Ebola testing in West Africa would save lives and could help bring an end to the outbreak

 

The dying at the tin-roofed clinic in the rural Kono district of Sierra Leone comes at a ruthless pace. In the first two weeks of October, 20 out of the 22 patients seeking treatment for Ebola died. That fatality rate, high even by the lethal standards of Ebola, could easily be brought down, says Dan Kelly, an infectious-disease doctor who is currently in Kono with the Wellbody Alliance, a medical nonprofit organisation he set up eight years ago. “The ability to test for Ebola, to test quickly, has become ever more important,” says Kelly, who believes the high death toll in the Kono clinic was due in part to the fact that there is no place to test for Ebola in the entire district. Instead, blood samples from suspected Ebola patients have to be sent to the capital over rutted mud roads that are often washed out by rain. “Even if we have the best treatments available, without a timely diagnosis people are still going to die,” says Kelly.

 

Work out quickly who does and does not have Ebola and you’ll get a long way toward stopping an outbreak that has killed at least 4,877 and infected thousands more. Right now that simple proposition can feel like a fantasy. In Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the three countries with the most cases, the need for rapid test results far outpaces the capacity to carry them out.

 

That means patients often aren’t getting treatment until it’s too late, when the disease has ravaged their bodies beyond repair, and when they may have already infected friends and family. “If patients are promptly diagnosed and receive aggressive supportive care, the great majority, as many as 90%, should survive,” wrote the global health expert Paul Farmer in a recent issue of the London Review of Books.

 

Even in a top U.S. laboratory it can take up to eight hours to search a blood sample for Ebola through an expensive and complex array of technical hardware and computer software called a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. military have helped by setting up four additional labs in West Africa over the past six months—Liberia now has a total of five, Sierra Leone four and Guinea three—but capacity is still limited to about 100 tests per lab per day, not nearly enough to cope with an epidemic that could grow to 10,000 new cases a week by December, according to the World Health Organization. Laurie Garrett, an expert on Ebola at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, says that number could be brought down through better testing. “The only thing that makes a dent when you model what is going on with the epidemic now and what it looks like in two months, is being able to separate the infected from the non-infected.”

 

Health care workers on the ground say that more PCR labs are urgently needed. “Crushing this epidemic means getting 70% of the population with Ebola into isolation and care,” Kelly says. That could be achieved, he believes, by putting a PCR lab in every district.

 

The challenges don’t stop there. Testing can create risks even as it offers solutions. Medical personnel must draw blood from patients for a PCR test, a potentially lethal process for caregivers. “Taking samples is extremely dangerous,” says Dr. Estrella Lasry, a tropical medicine adviser in Liberia for Doctors Without Borders (MSF). “At any time you risk a needlestick injury that can expose you to the virus.”

 

And then there’s the risk that patients without Ebola are being exposed to patients with the disease. Lasry estimates that 30% to 50% of people coming into the MSF clinics end up testing negative for Ebola and instead have other illnesses like malaria that have similar early symptoms. All those being tested for Ebola must wait in holding centers for their results, to ensure they don’t have an opportunity to infect others back at home if they test positive. That means patients with other illnesses must wait among patients with Ebola, increasing the chances of transmission.

 

Kelly hopes researchers can develop a test that could give readings at a clinic immediately and wouldn’t require trained technicians to interpret the results. “It would be a game changer if you could immediately identify patients needing quarantine from those who do not,” he says. Several versions of so-called point-of-care rapid diagnostic tests are already in development, but while some are at the testing stage, it is not clear when they could actually be used on the ground.

 

One U.S. company, Corgenix, received a $2.9 million grant in June from the National Institutes of Health to perfect its prototype, a pregnancy-test-style slip of paper that reveals a dark red line within 15 minutes when exposed to a drop of Ebola-infected blood. Instead of needles and syringes, test takers need only a pinprick to get the sample, much like an insulin test for diabetes patients. These tests, which would cost anywhere from $2 to $10 (PCR tests average about $100 each) could also be used in airports to confirm whether someone with symptoms has Ebola.

 

If the Corgenix test had been available, says one of its lead researchers, Robert F. Garry, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, it might have helped diagnose Amber Vinson, an American nurse infected with Ebola, before she boarded a flight from Cleveland to Dallas on Oct. 13. “This is a test that could be used anywhere you would want to test for Ebola,” says Garry. “Anyone could use it, and anyone could read it.”

 

With the epidemic worsening in West Africa, medical staff in Ebola-hit countries can’t afford to wait for companies like Corgenix to bring their product to market. Kelly has been hearing about better, faster tests almost since he started working on Ebola in June. He fears that pinning hopes on future technologies undermines efforts to ramp up testing facilities. “Everyone says they have a new test, but at this point I’m like, ‘Show me the money,’” says Kelly. “ We already have a working technology that is deployable. Get me a PCR in every district capital, and then we can start talking about faster tests.”

 

Garry says he has people in every U.S. time zone working “as fast as humanly possible” to get the Corgenix test out. “We want to make an impact on this outbreak,” he says. “With enough tests, we can shut it down it down.” Without them, Ebola may be here to stay.

 

http://time.com/3532077/need-faster-ebola-tests-for-outbreak-west-africa/

[Lookin]

This occurred to me a few weeks ago, but it seems Scientific American got to it a full month before I did. Their recommendation? Start transfusions from ebola survivors to new patients as quickly as possible.

 

Ebola survivors, who represent about 30% of those Africans who get the disease, have created antibodies in their blood that fight the virus. Otherwise, they wouldn't have survived.

 

As the days go by, we're learning that containing the spread of the ebola virus from one person to another is much trickier than we thought. And that's true even in the medically advanced U. S. health care system, let alone in Africa where the disease has nearly free rein in some areas. In the West Point slum of Monrovia, for example, there are four public toilets for 75,000 residents. Stopping transmission of the virus in conditions like these seems like a long shot at best.

 

And when someone does get the disease, s/he is contagious for weeks. And that's true whether the patient is one of the lucky ones who makes antibodies fast enough and recovers, or one of the unlucky ones who does not.

 

Transmission can happen in homes and in public places and, as we are learning, in hospital settings as well. With transfusions, not only could new patients be cured but it would seem only common sense to reduce the length of time a patient is contagious from weeks to days, thereby reducing the number of opportunities for the virus to jump from one person to another.

 

Transfusions have not been tested in a formal research setting, and neither have experimental treatments like ZMapp, which have also shown some promising results among those lucky enough to get them.

 

Zmapp is virtually unavailable, especially in Africa, but transfusions are. And they could be made widely available with little delay.

 

Of course, none of these experimental treatments have been proven effective, but there is a theoretical basis and anecdotal evidence that they will have a positive effect. Personally, if I had a disease with a 5% mortality rate, I might be wary of trying them. But, if I had a disease with a 70% mortality rate, like ebola, I'd try them in a New York minute.

 

I'm surprised there isn't more public debate about getting these experimental treatments into widespread use, especially in Africa where transmission is much harder to control than it is in the U. S.

 

But I bet there will be, and soon.

[+ Funguy]

Ebola: How to stop the disease ‘dead in its tracks’

October 20th 2014

 

It seemed like the nightmare scenario: Ebola had reached Africa’s biggest city, a chaotic and densely populated metropolis of slums and shantytowns where the virus threatened to spread to millions of people.

 

Health experts were terrified when Ebola struck Lagos in late July. They were deeply worried that it would be unstoppable in Nigeria, a rapidly urbanizing country of 170 million, far bigger than the nations where Ebola had begun. Their fears were heightened in August when the virus leaped another border and reached Senegal, another key West African country.

 

Yet today, in a remarkable display of how to beat the lethal virus, both Nigeria and Senegal have defeated their Ebola outbreaks. The World Health Organization announced on Friday that the outbreak was officially over in Senegal, and made the same declaration for Nigeria on Monday. In both countries, 42 days have passed since their last reported case – the standard rule for declaring an outbreak over, since it is twice the maximum 21-day incubation period for the virus.

 

“The most important lesson for the world at large is this: An immediate, broad-based and well-co-ordinated response can stop the Ebola virus … dead in its tracks,” the WHO said on Friday after declaring the end of the Senegal outbreak.

 

Based on the successes of Nigeria and Senegal, here are the strategies that can be adopted by other countries, including the United States and Canada, as they prepare for the threat of the virus.

 

Rapid response to the first case

 

Nigeria’s first Ebola patient, Patrick Sawyer, was initially thought to have malaria. But when malaria treatment failed at a local hospital, doctors immediately began treating him as a possible Ebola patient, and he was kept in isolation at the hospital. Officials were notified and a blood sample was rushed to a testing lab.

 

On July 23, just three days after Mr. Sawyer arrived in Lagos on an indirect flight from Liberia, the Nigerian health ministry set up an Ebola Incident Management Centre, which evolved into an Emergency Operations Centre to co-ordinate the response and the decision-making.

 

The centre took over the management of each suspected Ebola case. It investigated every possible case and supervised the decontamination of their homes. Each suspected case was isolated in a special ward of a treatment facility. Blood tests were rapidly conducted to verify if suspected cases were genuine or not.

 

Senegal, meanwhile, had been well-prepared with an Ebola response plan as early as March. It created a National Crisis Committee as the “nerve centre” for its response, and deployed its emergency plan nationwide in August, even though only a single case had been detected. “The whole country moved into a heightened state of alert,” the WHO said.

 

A rigorous and relentless system of contact-tracing

 

Nigerian health teams visited 18,500 homes in Lagos and Port Harcourt, the two cities where Ebola cases were reported, as they searched for anyone who had been in contact with the 20 Ebola patients in the country. More than 150 contact tracers were deployed.

 

The tracing teams tracked down 894 people who had been in contact with Ebola patients, and began monitoring their health closely. The WHO described it as “world-class epidemiological detective work.” Even mobile-phone data and law-enforcement agencies were employed to trace contacts, using an emergency presidential decree, and airplane manifests were scrutinized. Health workers visited any contact who reported symptoms – or who failed to provide health updates via cellphone text messages.

 

In Senegal, tracers found 74 close contacts of the country’s sole Ebola patient. The health of each of these 74 people was carefully monitored, twice a day. To encourage their co-operation, the contacts were offered food, money and psychological counselling.

 

An energetic campaign of public education

 

In Nigeria, social mobilization teams went house-to-house to visit 26,000 families who lived within two kilometres of the Ebola patients. They explained Ebola’s warning signs and how to prevent the virus from spreading. Leaflets and billboards, in multiple languages, along with social-media messages, were used to educate the broader Nigerian population.

 

Education was crucial in a country where dangerous myths were spreading. There was even a rumour that drinking large amounts of salt water would protect people from Ebola – a rumour that sickened and even killed some Nigerians who attempted the harmful diet.

 

Senegal, too, created a national public-awareness campaign, using media experts and local radio networks.

 

Effective public-health institutions

 

Senegal and Nigeria both benefited from a stronger and better-financed system of public health than Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the impoverished countries where the current epidemic began.

 

Nigeria also took advantage of the infrastructure of a polio eradication program that had been active for years. A polio and HIV clinic in Lagos, financed by the Gates Foundation, was transformed into an emergency centre for Ebola, with dozens of doctors available.

 

Nigeria was also quick to welcome foreign help. There was remarkable co-ordination between every level of Nigerian government and global health organizations such as the WHO, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Private companies donated ambulances, disinfectant and other important supplies.

 

Heightened vigilance and screening at borders, but a refusal to halt air travel

 

Nigeria and Senegal boosted their surveillance for Ebola, especially at land border crossings, but they never closed their airports.

 

“Critically important early on was the government’s decision to open a humanitarian corridor in Dakar to facilitate the movement and activities of humanitarian agencies,” the WHO said. “This decision meant that food, medicines and other essential supplies could seamlessly and efficiently flow into the country.”

 

source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/ebola-how-to-stop-the-disease-dead-in-its-tracks/article21159394/

 

It's still too bad that uninformed people think that measles and chicken pox are benign illnesses. WRONG - every year hundreds (usually kids, elderly, and immunocompromised) die from these VPD's (vaccine-preventable diseases). Those who refuse the vaccines have their heads in the sand - and no, THEY DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM!!!

 

All of the above could wipe those diseases out, too.

 

As an adult, I had measles (too old to have had the vaccine) and I was sick as shit and almost hospitalized, I had pneumonia and encephalitis from the virus.

 

And all you older guys, and any who have had chicken pox, better get the Shingles vaccine, too. Shingles is caused by the chicken pox virus living dormant in the nerve roots.

 

Sorry to go off-thread...

[armadillo]

Gov's Christie and Cuomo step-up to the line where Obama won't, mandatory quarantine. Good bipartisan work!!!

 

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/10/24/new-york-new-jersey-set-up-mandatory-quarantine-requirement-amid-ebola-threat/

[Steven_Draker]

I'm surprised there isn't more public debate about getting these experimental treatments into widespread use, especially in Africa where transmission is much harder to control than it is in the U.S.

 

 

Big pharma has an interest in rich people being sick

 

The giant pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline said yesterday that its work on a vaccine for Ebola will “come too late” to do anything about the current situation. Even now it is trying to compress trials that would normally take a decade into a year. The impression it gives is that it is working flat out, no holds barred. But hang on a moment. Ebola was discovered back in 1976. What has GlaxoSmithKline been doing since then? Answer: not much.

 

A small clue to why can be found by looking at the stock price of Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, the Canadian-based drugs firm that some investors seem to think is leading the pack on Ebola research. Tekmira shares rose a massive 180% from mid-July to October, with most of the share-price action coming when the virus jumped to Europe and the US.

 

Ebola has been killing people in central and western Africa for at least 38 years – but it’s only when the virus becomes a threat to the developed world that there is seen to be a profit in it. I know it sounds cynical to say it flat out like that – but it sounds cynical because it is. What business case is there for developing drugs to save the lives of poor Africans when they don’t have the money to pay for them? Especially when there is so much more profit to be had in – for instance – giving rich white men erections. As a study in last year’s Lancet showed, of the 336 new drugs developed in the first decade of this century, only four of them were for what are known in jargon as neglected tropical diseases – three for malaria and one for diarrhea.

 

The point being this: the business model of market-driven big (or even medium-sized) pharma does not work well to address the challenges posed by a virus that ultimately has no respect for geography or bank balance. Some of the developed world’s early interest in Ebola was in whether it could be weaponised. It was said that the Russian biological weapons unit – Biopreparat – had turned Ebola into an aerosol spray.

 

All of which is red meat for conspiracy theorists (like those who tell you that the patent for the Ebola virus is owned by the US government, which is true). But my suspicion is not about shady government actions but about basic capitalist economics. Isn’t it interesting that there is money about to ask scientists to turn a virus into a weapon, but not the money about to ask scientists to find a vaccine? And by the time there’s a market for a vaccine, it’s too late.

 

What better example of what is commonly called market failure – that state of affairs in which market forces do not make for desirable outcomes. Here’s another example: remember Nelson Mandela having to take on the big pharmaceutical companies as thousands of dying South Africans were unable to afford Aids drugs. Apparently, the market-driven economics of health care do not have an answer to a virus that begins in a part of the world where there isn’t much money. And that is often where dangerous viruses begin. Which is precisely why market forces will not be able to save us.

 

Indeed, on the contrary, market-driven healthcare is incentivised to keep us sick. For what profit is there in a healthy population? If everyone were healthy, it would be the job of the pharmaceutical companies to persuade us that we were not well, that certain things about us needed fixing, putting right (even if they didn’t).

 

Its a bit like Friedrich Nietzsche’s criticism of the Christian priest: that the priest first has to poison us into imagining we are unwell – and thus in need of saving – before he can present himself as the cure, as salvation. There is no market for salvation in a sinless world. Of course, big pharma presents itself as evidence-based and scientific. Not at all like Nietzsche’s Christianity. But it’s not the science that calls the tune. It is the stock price. And the stock price goes up when rich people feel threatened.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/oct/17/big-pharma-interest-rich-people-sick

[Lookin]

Ebola has been killing people in central and western Africa for at least 38 years – but it’s only when the virus becomes a threat to the developed world that there is seen to be a profit in it. I know it sounds cynical to say it flat out like that – but it sounds cynical because it is. What business case is there for developing drugs to save the lives of poor Africans when they don’t have the money to pay for them?

 

This is why I believe transfusions with antibodies from recovered patients is the path that makes the most sense.

 

It would be great to have a drug that's known to work, and ZMapp may be that drug. However, by the time it gets produced in sufficient quantities, even if testing were bypassed and the government took over production directly, many thousands more will die.

 

Transfusions could start tomorrow.

[rvwnsd]

...Transfusions could start tomorrow.

 

Not quite. Blood typing the ebola patients could start tomorrow, but only if the means and facilities to do so exist and are available. Then, health officials could start matching patients with survivors of the same blood type, assuming records of the survivors' blood types are available. If not, the survivors need to be typed. Once that occurs, patients and survivors of compatible types could be matched. However, one has to wonder if there is a sufficient number of survivors to supply blood to the patients. This could be more complex than it seems.

[armadillo]

Q: Can you get Ebola while sitting on a bus?

 

I find it absolutely hilarious how hard they try to evade the questions and how persistent Massie is at getting an answer.

 

[Steven_Draker]

Q: Can you get Ebola while sitting on a bus?

 

Wrap yourself in a garbage bag!

 

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/04/11/article-2307713-193E4E9B000005DC-456_634x632.jpg

 

 

Ebola Scare

[+ purplekow]

Maybe we could start shooting Ebola with guns. People with guns in Africa have killed thousand of times more people. Here in the US tens of thousands of people.