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Ebola Vaccine Passes Initial Human Tests
An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com has an article about the first successful tests of an Ebola vaccine on human subjects." From the article: "Nabel and colleagues at the NIH's Vaccine Research Center developed a vaccine made of DNA strands that encode three Ebola proteins. They boosted that vaccine with a weakened cold-related virus, and the combination protected monkeys exposed to Ebola. The first human testing looked just at the vaccine's DNA portion; the full combination will be tested later. At a microbiology meeting in Washington on Friday, Nabel and colleagues reported seeing no worrisome side effects when comparing six people given dummy shots with 21 volunteers given increasing doses of the DNA vaccine."
If I remember correctly, Ebola was this virus a few years ago that "spread from apes to humans" and thus would spread and kill us all. Wait, isn't that what Avian Flu is going to do to us? It's all a lot of hype.
It's a lot of valid potentiality that gets drummed up as hype by doomsayers, the media, and anyone else who has something to gain by promoting a state of fear, interest or worry in people.
Total worldwide ebola deaths since 1976 are 1,500. If you catch it, there's an 80% chance you'll die.
But then there have been 1.2million people in the US alone killed in fatal car accidents in the same time period. If you're caught in a fatal car accident, there's a pretty big chance you'll die too.
Avian flu is known to have killed under 100 people worldwide, since 1996. Worldwide deaths from normal influenza currently reach 500,000 EVERY SINGLE YEAR worldwide. FIVE MILLION PEOPLE since 1996.
Read the above and you see how the panic effect of statistics is all in how the info is presented. Don't rely on alarmist messages of any type (this one included) to base your fears on, go & read up as much background info as you can. It makes the only sense.
Ebola is certainly deadly. If anything, it's underhyped. The thing that is overhyped however, is the "it will kill us all!" mentality. Sure, it's one of the most gruesome and deadly viruses around (classified even higher than AIDS), but it is spread only by direct contact with infected fluids. And when someone has Ebola, you KNOW they have it, and there is little chance you'll be close enough to the person to get infected. It mainly is prevalent in places like Africa, since they reuse needles in their hospitals there. Ebola takes 2 weeks or so after initial infection (about a week before anything starts to show up) to kill, or come close to killing a victim. It surrounds and destroys cells, and it is known to partially or completely liquify the kidneys and liver. There is craploads of bleeding from every orifice, and vomitting dead blood. They say even one droplet of blood at that stage contains at least 100,000,000 particles of the virus. It just destroys you, literally. There are a few strains, the one of the lowest mortality rate being 50%, and the highest being 90%.
Participants in clinical trials are required to be told what is or could be happening to them throughout the trial. For drug trials that make it to the clinical stage, single or double blind methods are used depending on how far along the drug is on its way to the market. Participants are told that they will be given either the drug or a placebo, and are monitored for any side effects. In this case, no one has actually been infected with ebola. All that has been done is the administration of a vaccine to see if it elicited an immune response (the participants made antibodies against ebola) and to see if it had any obvious side effects (it did not).
Actually, Ebola has an incubation period of up to 3 weeks. Symptoms only appear after the incubation period. That means it is quite possible for someone to be infected and not notice. Check out the "Myths" section in Wikipedia's article on Ebola.
We used to puke blood and have gaping sores appear and gosh darn it that's how we LIKED it!
considering the rarity of ebola, what's the point of a vaccine? Who do you even give it to? From wikipedia: "Of the approximate 1,500 identified Ebola cases worldwide, over 80% of the patients have died." Maybe we should be working on a cure for fan death instead.
It could be used to help fight an outbreak. Right now the only thing we have is isolation. If we could send health workers a few dozen miles ahead of the outbreak to start innoculating people, that might stop the outbreak in its tracks. Of course, it may take a while for full immunity to take effect but I imagine even partial immunity is better than nothing.
Let me guess the group bleeding out of their eyes got the placebo?
Yes, we should get terminology correct. I will not point out why the "ebola virus" would not be affected by antibiotics.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
No problem. Just take new NyQuil-EB: It's the one cold medication especially designed for when you have those itchy, sneezy, bleeding-out-of-every-orifice cold symptoms.
Khyber, Ebola is a virus, not a bacteria.
Ebola is a filovirus, one of the simplest and deadliest that we know of on earth.
If I remember correctly, it is a string of biological matter that consists of six proteins and looks under a microscope like a shepherd's crook.
It infects cells in the human body - both blood and tissue - and replicates quite rapidly utilizing the body's own RNA strands until the cell literally bursts and releases quite a large quantity of the newly formed virus, which then infects more cells and repeats the process.
Ebola's only purpose is to replicate inside the warm biological matter of humans and monkeys, destroying cellular tissue as it goes about its "life cycle".
Ebola Zaire kills about 9 out of 10 people it comes into direct contact with, and Marburg - another filovirus - kills about 8 out of 10.
Ebola Reston was first found in Washington state in a storage facility built to house monkeys. It infected two workers who came into contact with dead or infected monkeys, but it didn't kill them.
Ebola Reston and Ebola Zaire are 1 marker apart in their protein make-up, but Zaire kills humans while Reston doesn't seem to, yet.
However, Ebola Reston seems capable of moving through the air, hence monkeys in the storage warehouse getting sick without contact with each other but all breathing the same re-circulated air conditioned air inside.
Ebola Zaire, deadly, only contractable through contact with infected bodily fluids. Ebola Reston, one protein different and apparently able to be breathed out by an infected person and infect someone else, like a cold.
Think about that.
I hope that this anti-viral vaccine is able to be produced quickly and cheaply because we don't want an outbreak of mutated Reston.
His name is Robert Paulsen...
Frankly that's an idiotic argument. Fortunatly our medical science has now advanced to the point we can see potential threats coming. Avian Influenza is a case in point - if it does mutate to pass from human to human then it's very likely to be a rerun of 1918 (the viruses are remarkably similar) and kill 5% of the population. The 1918 epidemic killed more people that WWI.
Ebola is less of an immediate threat, but there are some signs that it, or something related, could mutate to an airborne or aerosol form. On the scale of risk the probability is low, but there's some convincing arguments that some past plagues - even the Black Death - were hemorregic fevers.
It therefore makes sense that we take some preventative measures against potential threats now. Personally I'm very glad that the WHO hyped up Avian Flu because at least governments have started to take some precautions, pump money into vaccine development etc. If we are luckly and the virus doesn't mutate for another year or two then there's a good chance that the death rate from an epidemic could be substantially cut. Reducing the number of cases of Avian Flu in humans by culling birds and inducing fear in the populations where it occurs all helps by reducing the chances the virus has to mutate.
Of course in some cases the percieved threat will never have been real, and in others preventative actions will stall a major disaster so the sceptics will argue there was no major threat in the first place. Whatever, in both human and economic terms the cost of a small amount of hype and preparatory action now will pay off many, many times over.
"We're going to test this vaccine on you, now there may be a few side effects."
"What sort of thing, doc?"
"Well, nausea, itching, your entire body melting, and there's a chance of drowsiness. So avoid using heavy machinery."
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?