Possible Treatment For Ebola

RedEaredSlider writes "Researchers at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases have found a class of drugs that could provide treatment for Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fever. The new drugs are called 'antisense' compounds, and they allow the immune system to attack the viruses before they can do enough damage to kill the patient. Travis Warren, research scientist at USAMRIID, said while the work is still preliminary -— the drugs have been tested only on primates — the results are so far promising. In the case of Ebola, five of eight monkeys infected with the virus lived, and with Marburg, all survived. The drugs were developed as part of a program to deal with possible bioterrorist threats, in partnership with AVI Biopharma."

Comments

This Is Great News ...

[WrongSizeGlass]

... but how on earth will the people affected by these diseases get these drugs in time once they are sick? We can't even get decent distribution of (somewhat) affordable malaria drugs to the parts of the world that need it. This will be just one more cure for a disease that is defeated by poverty and corruption in parts of the world that can't afford any more of either.

Re:This Is Great News ...

[Relic of the Future]

Note: "possible bioterrorist threats"

This isn't meant to help poor third-world countries, or to deal with natural outbreaks. The concerns you express were never part of the project's goals.

(Not saying that's a good thing; just saying that that's what it is.)

Re:This Is Great News ...

[CrimsonAvenger]

The UN will address the symptoms with food and aid, but will never address the problem of dictatorships and warlords that cause this poverty and corruption.

The U.N. doesn't have any way to deal with dictatorships and warlords, since most of them are members in good standing of the U.N. If you were to expel all the nations with disfunctional governments from the U.N., it would look a lot like NATO (plus Japan and India)...

As an American, I really wish the British Empire never dissolved.

So, basically you wish that the British were still around to do all the things you say rude things about the Americans doing? Or do you somehow imagine that the British ruled their Empire without fighting in third-world hellholes pretty regularly?

Re:This Is Great News ...

[TopSpin]

how on earth will the people affected by these diseases get these drugs in time

Don't think like an ambulance driver. If some part of the world is attacked with ebola people will be killed. The response will then be to manufacture and deploy the 'antidote' to the contaminated area and other areas that might also be at risk of attack. Meanwhile the attackers get hunted down, with prejudice, as the saying goes.

one more cure for a disease that is defeated by poverty and corruption

All the good intentions in the world are doomed in the face of corruption, of which poverty is only the most obvious symptom. A solution is not invalid only because it requires more sophistication than can exist in corrupt and impoverished places. When it's your butt on the line you aren't going to walk away from the fix just because the Congolese don't have the option. You will demand it as a right and curse anyone that fails to agree.

Re:This Is Great News ...

[interkin3tic]

They'll have it for "critical personnel," AKA not you or I, and certainly not the people who would actually be encountering ebola.

That said, I don't know much about this antisense treatment, but it seems to be based on oligonucleotides, short DNA sequences. Oligos aren't too expensive, have a long shelf life (for my applications anyway) and when dehydrated can be stored at room temperature for quite a while. If antisense therapy works for a wide variety of viruses, it could make sense for large cities and major international airports to have a "toolkit" of antisense oligos ready to go for a variety of outbreaks, and this wouldn't be too expensive to maintain. If ebola entered the network of airports and large outbreaks started, you could have the therapy right there. Influenza? Same thing.

But with ebola, the time you have is extremely short, and if an outbreak happened in a large city, I doubt anything could be deployed soon enough. And there's no way cities are going to spend the money to keep enough to dose everyone on hand. And that still wouldn't help the populations in Africa who would be exposed first.

By the way, I find it somewhat strange that "terrorism" is mentioned as a reason here. I guess it's possible that terrorists have biological safety cabinets and autoclaves, and certainly it's dangerous to underestimate terror threats, but I'm imagining Osama bin Laden saying "Lets get some of this Ebola." Terrorist lackey number one obtains a jar of infected blood, hands it to Osama without gloves, and two days later they're all bleeding to death from every orifice.

Re:This Is Great News ...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Well, you can blame the US for South & Central America problems sure. Long history of involvement there. But Africa? When were any African Nations "doing just fine" meaning "not suffering from being poor and not having dictators"?

Note: I'm not saying American Forien Policy has always been the best for African nations, but were the countries really ever OK? Go back before we were involved and you run into the Colonial rule. Which ( with the exception of Liberia), was mostly European in nature.

Re:This Is Great News ...

[Darth_brooks]

but an incident in the Philippines in 2009 where Ebola infected swine illustrates that cosmopolitan animals (like pigs) can carry the virus.

Pigs are hardly cosmopolitan animals. In fact, the last pig I encountered was downright boarish.

Re:This Is Great News ...

[corbettw]

The UN will address the symptoms with food and aid, but will never address the problem of dictatorships and warlords that cause this poverty and corruption.

That's because the UN was set up to help provide a way to prevent wars between nations. As long as a dictator is only starving his own people, the UN has no reason to get involved. It sucks, but the alternative is to have the UN turn into a one-world government, which could present its own set of challenges.

This is how anti-terrorism funding should be spent

[Anonymous Coward]

This, right here, is an example of the correct priorities for anti-terrorism funding.

It's much harder to cure someone who has been blown up by a bomb, I realize that. But, things like this, and harmonizing emergency radio systems, and subsidized first aid, and other sensible measures that should be done anyway but aren't only as a pure factor of economic reality, they are the first things that should be in line for funding that truly saves lives and makes people safer; and they work equally well for terrorism, natural disasters, negligent officials, and plain bad luck (unlike most anti-terrorism programs which look impressive but are essentially military in nature).

Bruce Schneier has said the same thing for about as long. But still you've got sheriffs buying robotic sentry cannons and military research into autonomous robotic assassins. It's only lucky that, like the space program, the benefits do eventually trickle down to private industry and then to the general population. But it could still be better spent in the first place, for more immediate effect.

So, what are the chances of this actually being supplied to "unimportant" people (ie. foreign countries), for fear of bioterrorist chemists engineering resistant strains?

Re:This is how anti-terrorism funding should be sp

[mr_mischief]

IMO first aid should be a required class beginning in about the 6th grade, right along with household and small business microeconomics.