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Vaccine Developed Against Ebola
New submitter Lurching writes "Scientists have developed a vaccine that protects mice against a deadly form of the Ebola virus. First identified in 1976, Ebola fever kills more than 90% of the people it infects. The researchers say that this is the first Ebola vaccine to remain viable long-term and can therefore be successfully stockpiled. The results are reported in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (abstract)."
+5 funny for cosmonaut mondegreen.
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
this may be a sign of my generation/youngness speaking...but....whut?
The mice will be spared.
A mondegreen is a misheard song lyric.
I explicitly release the above into the public domain.
It's got a slightly more literary scope, not just song lyrics; originally it was poetry. Also popular are malapropisms, wherein the speaker makes a comparable error, not the listener.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I mean, sure, it's against some big ol' treaties but wouldn't the first step be to nullify its effect on your own troops/people?
[/conspiracy]
Not really credible any more for use in fiction, a weaponized version of ebola. Tom Clancy will just have to thing of something else.
The issue isn't "Who will do it". It is "It can be done, therefore it will be done."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
no offense, but i hope you're not in charge for something important... :P
I mean, seriously you are so full of shit. I'm not going to waste my time picking your argument apart, just a few choice quotes:
17 labs on Earth working to weaponize Ebola
Woah, that's a precise number. Out of your magic 8 ball ?
Mendellian methods
It's called 'evolution'. And the radical terrorists don't believe in it, haven't you heard ?
give off neutrino emissions that make it glow like the sun to spy satellites
Learn the difference between neutrons and neutrinos. The latter are incredibly hard to detect (and currently at the heart of the 'faster than light' debate, but I digress), it takes a detector the size of a mountain.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
And then because CO2 output dropped, the glaciers come and pare us back to maybe 100,000.
Nice!
Finally monkey meat again! :-P
And here I thought that Hezbollah was a human organization --- now you tell me it's an emergent strain of Ebola? Cute, it even rhymes!
(Next time, check the possible associations in your phrasing.)
<mind wanders>
If only there could be vaccines against (other's) human aggression....
But there are 17 labs on Earth working to weaponize Ebola. I hear there are 57 varieties of Ebola too. More seriously if some nation were to mysteriously start inoculating its population against some rare pathogen such as ebola, it is rather likely that it would be noticed. It's also likely that in the period of time taken for this contagion to spread that said nation would be on the receiving end of nuclear volleys lobbed at it by the infected countries.
I work for a big pharma company, as a sysadmin. I don't know much about the science though.
Any company finding a cure for HIV or cancer or the common cold would have its stock skyrocket, turning the board instant billionaires.
Somehow I have trouble believing that they would suppress a cure, just for the purpose of being evil at their own expense.
And it isn't a cure, in case you missed that. It is a vaccine. Like the vaccine against smallpox. Once you get smallpox or ebola, your chances still suck.
Cancer is really thousands of different diseases. They are so dissimilar that they really should have completely different names. But we don't for historic reasons.
A vaccine is not really a "cure", is a strong hint to your immune system. In many ways something like ebola is easier to deal with since it is certainly not in its natural host in the first place. While the likes of influenza is, or more accurately has evolved to survive against our immune system.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
If a lot of people know about the vaccine, it will be harder for them to do that. So be reassured that you know about it. If you are afraid of weaponization, and want to do something about it, post this story on your blog/Facebook. I actually predict most countries are going to stay within the Biological Weapons Convention.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
While the press covers Ebola millions die each year from Malaria. Understandable because the climate of North America and Europe is mostly not tropical but very sad nevertheless.
Ebola is a possible bio-weapon. Any vaccine developed would have an immediate market within the armed forces - quite an incentive to develop one, if you ask me.
I would suspect that the vaccine, once as reasonably perfected as possible, would be intended for healthcare workers, researchers, and other individuals who are likely to be exposed to the virus as an occupational hazard, rather than something for mass consumption. Alternatively, if we hear of an outbreak we can ship in a crate of the vaccine and use it as an immediate prophylaxis for the residents of the area to even further limit the number of deaths.
Besides, filoviruses have a rather fascinatingly unique structure. If we can make an effective vaccine against one of those, the techniques developed in the process make it easier to create vaccines against other nasty viruses with similar traits.
Stop being paranoid. Any drug company that would invent a cure for HIV or cancer would make a fortune. Any competitors who rely on treating those diseases instead of curing them would go out of business.
Of those diseases you mentioned, only HIV, herpes, and the common cold are caused by a virus and can therefor be compared to Ebola. HIV and herpes are retroviruses, which can insert themselves in a cell's DNA and thus lie dormant (and undetectable) for a long time, and both target cell-types that can live for years/decades. Neither is as deadly as Ebola, but both are much more persistent. HIV also mutates rapidly, making it even harder to fight.
The common cold is not a single disease, virus, it's actually hundreds of different ones (caused by as many different viruses) that have very similar symptoms. Curing any single one is not that hard. Curing every single one is a challenge.
As for cancer, all cancers are different (after all, they tend to result from damaged DNA, which can happen in any number of ways). Fighting cancer cells without damaging the rest of the body is very hard because they're so closely related.
Surely none of the above is too 'complex' for a layman like you to understand?
> I see little point in such a debate because I do believe that suppression is going on.
Good for you, but in that case why even bring up those other diseases, as by your own admission the complexity of curing such diseases is irrelevant to your belief that cures for those diseases are being suppressed?
It is far more profitable to treat diseases than to cure them...
Even if this is true (which I am not convinced that it is), it overlooks one very important point. If Company A supresses research into curing BIG DISEASE so that it can continue to profit from treating BIG DISEASE, it runs the risk that Company B will develop a cure for that disease. If the latter happens, no only will Company A not make money from selling the cure for BIG DISEASE, they will no longer make money from treating BIG DISEASE. Additionally, they will have lost out on the opportunity for the positive PR of being the company that developed the cure for BIG DISEASE.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
it takes a detector the size of a mountain.
Actually, it only takes a detector the size of a salt mine.
Mendellian methods
It's called 'evolution'. And the radical terrorists don't believe in it, haven't you heard ?
According to his own manifesto Anders Behring Breivik, the guy that tried bombed a government building in Norway before he went to the ruling party’s youth camp and started shooting people, believe in evolution.
Spelling/grammar nazis welcome (English is not my first language and I am trying to improve my spelling/grammar)
It is far more profitable to treat diseases than to cure them....profitable enough to allow greed and corruption to control research and results.
But is it more profitable to let the competition treat a disease than it is for your company to cure it? The whole "cures are being supressed for profit" only works if there is only one medical company AND it is impressively farsighted, not wanting the billions upon billions they could make curing AIDS or cancer now. And somehow simultaneously too shortsighted to see that a population not dying from cancer is an ageing population, and that an ageing population will need even more medicine in the long run.
I wasn't aware that Ebola was still around. thanks for sharing the article. interesting read
I know this is splitting hairs, but the mortality rate across all known subvarieties of Ebola is more like 68%, according to various sources, including Wikipedia's article about it, which means Ebola probably isn't even in the top 10 for highest mortality. Number one is probably rabies, where there is no record of anyone having survived, ever, without medical treatment, and once symptoms of the disease have started appearing, even with the best modern medical care, less than a half-dozen people have survived.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Bio-weapons are normally chosen based on a few criteria:
1.) Deadly
2.) Spreads easily
3.) Gestation period where the infected show little to no symptoms
The last one is key. Ebola may meet the first two, but easy to tell who is infected. That greatly improves the odds of a quarantine working against the disease. That's why influenza is a much bigger scare, even though Ebola has a much higher fatality rate. It's hard to tell if you have the flu or if it's something else like a cold + fatigue.
More seriously if some nation were to mysteriously start inoculating its population against some rare pathogen such as ebola, it is rather likely that it would be noticed.
Depends. If it was done in North Korea, nobody would even hear about it. In other oppresive-ish (think Muslim theocracies) nations it could be pulled off, too - build a flu-vaccine program to inoculate your whole population, then, after a couple year, swap out the vaccines and make it clear to the doctors doing the injecting that any unwanted publicity will be met with disappearances.
It would be harder to do it in the West, sure, but we're the ones least likely to resort to biological warfare, anyway. It's all those little fanatical tin-pot dictatorships that you should be worried about.
FTA:
"He said the next step is to try the vaccine on a strain of Ebola that is closer to the one that infects humans."
i.e. they've not yet tested a vaccine for the strains of Ebola (Zaire comes to mind) that infect humans, never mind actually in humans.
give off neutrino emissions that make it glow like the sun to spy satellites
Learn the difference between neutrons and neutrinos. The latter are incredibly hard to detect (and currently at the heart of the 'faster than light' debate, but I digress), it takes a detector the size of a mountain.
You're obviously lying. There's no way we have any spy satellites the size of a mountain.
My webcomic
My mouse is hemorrhaging blood from all the pores on his body, but at least he doesn't have autism!
This post was brought to you by the considerate folks from the McCarthy Institute of Better Science
MS is a neurological issue, and they are almost all difficult to treat. They are often due to genetic defects in the body itself, so unlike bacteria or viruses you can't just kill of the bad stuff since you kinda need your brain.
HIV and the common cold mutate rapidly and hence it is very difficult to develop a vaccine. By the time it would be out of clinical trials there would be mutated versions of the strain that the vaccine does not protect against. HIV has the additional nuisance of infecting the body's memory-cells, which is what provides imunity for decades during typical vaccination. As a consequence, even if you clear the bloodstream of HIV , the infected imune cells can still produce HIV particles decades latter.
Cancer is your own cells going haywire, and for many types of cancer we have effective treatments. Skin cancer has a very high survival rate to take an example. The trouble usually occurs with cancer that spread to many vital organs , or very sensitive organs ( such as lung cancer ) , as that makes it very difficult to remove it without killing vital healthy tissue. In addition some cancers occur without symptoms for years, meaning that by the time you realize you have them they have often spread or caused enough trouble to be extremely difficult to treat. Nevertheless, many lifestyl factors can be altered to reduce your cancer risk by up to 40%. Avoid tobacco, eat plenty of fresh fruit and veg, and drink less than 7 units of alcohol per week.
Herpes is another nuisance in that the virus "hides" in parts of the nerve system where the immune cells can't get to it. As with other viruses it cannot be treated with antibiotics ( since it infects your own cells and trick them into producing more virus particles ) , making it tricky to kill it without hurting healthy cells.
In general, almost no viral diseases can be "cured" once you are infected. You just have to wait for the body to fight them off. In some cases a vaccine can help prevent them, but this doesn't work well for viruses that mutate rapidly, or those viruses that can damage or evade the immunity system.
Cancers, neurological problems, genetic disorders and autoimune diseases can be hard to treat because they involve the body's own tissue. Thus you cannot just kill them off without risking serious side effects.
Basically, bacteria and yeast infections are generally much easier to treat for the simple reason that they are quite different from your own cells, and thus there's a wide range of compounds that are harmless to us, yet lethal to the pathogens. Unfortunately abuse and misuse of antibiotics, as well as lacking access to healthcare has resulted in quite a few bacterial strain developing antibiotics resistance.
I work for a big pharma company, as a sysadmin. I don't know much about the science though. Any company finding a cure for HIV or cancer or the common cold would have its stock skyrocket, turning the board instant billionaires.
Once in the mid nineties I was in a car wreck, and looking at the X-Rays the radiologist remarked that I had spinal arthritis. I said "I know, when are you guys going to find a cure for arthritis?"
He just smiled and said "there's no money in cures; we do treatments."
Cure you and you're only their customer once. Treat you and you're a customer forever. And... it seems a little perverse to me that you are a doctor's customer. In other countries, doctors have patients. You can bet that if any pharma comes up with a cure for a disease they have a profitable treatment for, they're going to bury it as deeply as they can.
Free Martian Whores!
"Giese, a teenager from Wisconsin, became the first of only six patients known to have survived symptomatic rabies without receiving the rabies vaccine."
Source: Milwaukee protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Seriously, just what we need, more humans running around.
Doctors, nurses and others really take a serious risk in trying to help patients infected with this virus. Now those who are likely to be called in during an outbreak can be inoculated in advance of the emergencies. Ebola is such a wicked virus and so difficult to control that this is a real blessing to humanity.
I work for a big pharma company, as a sysadmin. I don't know much about the science though.
Any company finding a cure for HIV or cancer or the common cold would have its stock skyrocket, turning the board instant billionaires.
And I would have no problem believing your theory, except for the fact that they currently earn trillions by perpetuating a disease instead of curing it. Greed is far more powerful than most people can even remotely fathom.
And remember, anyone on a board overseeing anything related to big pharma is already obscenely rich, so for them to simply throw away the very revenue stream that put them there in the first place would NOT be as quick a decision as you might think.
Somehow I have trouble believing that they would suppress a cure, just for the purpose of being evil at their own expense.
When evil generates trillions of dollars and guarantees the good ol' boy network of cronyism will continue to prosper vs. considering the benefit and well-being of all mankind, I'd bet my first born as to who will win that battle.
And it isn't a cure, in case you missed that. It is a vaccine. Like the vaccine against smallpox. Once you get smallpox or ebola, your chances still suck.
You're right, and I stand corrected. Ironically, I should have caught that, because this is usually as far as we get with most diseases anyway. Ever wonder why we seem to stop at a vaccine and never a cure? It's simple, because vaccines are yet another form of perpetual treatment, with an equally perpetual revenue stream.
It is far more profitable to treat diseases than to cure them...
Even if this is true (which I am not convinced that it is), it overlooks one very important point. If Company A supresses research into curing BIG DISEASE so that it can continue to profit from treating BIG DISEASE, it runs the risk that Company B will develop a cure for that disease. If the latter happens, no only will Company A not make money from selling the cure for BIG DISEASE, they will no longer make money from treating BIG DISEASE. Additionally, they will have lost out on the opportunity for the positive PR of being the company that developed the cure for BIG DISEASE.
Don't assume the suppression is limited to inside big pharma. Look at the big picture. Your Government certainly is.
Why would they want to allow the release of a cure for a disease that does quite well in culling the population, and keeping that population growth from exploding faster than it already is. That may sound very evil and ugly, but resource management is a very real responsibility of many Governments today. And our current rate of population growth isn't making that job any easier for anyone. Think people living longer is a good thing in the long run? Think again.
Not to mention the risk of collusion within a trillion dollar industry. Hell, if collusion is a massive problem at the virtual poker table online with maybe a few thousand at stake, what makes you think big pharma as a whole would not do the exact same thing when trillions are at stake? It's not just Company A vs. Company B. It's an entire industry, out to protect it's profits as a whole. Once a cure is found, there WILL be a terminal end-date to that revenue stream, so even when you win, you lose. This is why I believe we will rarely (if ever) actually see a true cure for many of the diseases we're fighting today.
And our current rate of population growth isn't making that job any easier for anyone.
You obviously have not been paying attention. Every first world country has reason to be concerned about how slow their population is growing. Europe has negative population growth. Additionally, every industrialized nation has structured their retirement systems on the assumption that those working will provide the resources for those who have retired to live a comfortable life.
You, also, seem to be under the impression that once a disease is cured that no one will ever get it again. When we develop a cure for cancer, you will continually have people who need that cure. Cancer is not going to disappear when a cure is developed. It is just that people who get it will get cured. The other problem with your way of thinking is that you seem to think that someone who has been cured of cancer will never get it again. Since cancer is primarily the result of a person's own cells going rogue, that seems improbable.
As an example, antibiotics are the cure for pneumonia yet people still get pneumonia all the time. Some people get it more than once in their lifetime.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Stop being paranoid. Any drug company that would invent a cure for HIV or cancer would make a fortune. Any competitors who rely on treating those diseases instead of curing them would go out of business.
Of those diseases you mentioned, only HIV, herpes, and the common cold are caused by a virus and can therefor be compared to Ebola. HIV and herpes are retroviruses, which can insert themselves in a cell's DNA and thus lie dormant (and undetectable) for a long time, and both target cell-types that can live for years/decades. Neither is as deadly as Ebola, but both are much more persistent. HIV also mutates rapidly, making it even harder to fight.
The common cold is not a single disease, virus, it's actually hundreds of different ones (caused by as many different viruses) that have very similar symptoms. Curing any single one is not that hard. Curing every single one is a challenge.
As for cancer, all cancers are different (after all, they tend to result from damaged DNA, which can happen in any number of ways). Fighting cancer cells without damaging the rest of the body is very hard because they're so closely related.
Surely none of the above is too 'complex' for a layman like you to understand?
> I see little point in such a debate because I do believe that suppression is going on.
Good for you, but in that case why even bring up those other diseases, as by your own admission the complexity of curing such diseases is irrelevant to your belief that cures for those diseases are being suppressed?
I bring up all those other diseases because I believe we've either found a cure for them, or we've come a LOT farther than we are today, and it's merely the greed of the entire industry acting as a whole protecting its profits and ensuring their survivability.
Those are also most of the diseases that keep the population numbers from exploding. Whether you want to believe it, or even think it, resource management is the job of every major Government on this planet. And they're all struggling with it. Think we won't go the way of Soylent Green a few decades from now? Sure didn't take us long to rack up another billion people on this tiny little planet of ours, and I'm not seeing too many options to leave this rock anytime soon.
Go read about a man named Burzynski and how bad he was crucified for bringing merely a better treatment and survivability rate for many cancers today. He didn't even bring forth a vaccine or a true cure, and yet they were absolutely relentless in trying to suppress him and keep his discovery a secret or illegal. Think the industry doesn't act as a whole and true competition is allowed? Yeah, right.
If it's hard to believe that's OK. Just hold your breath for another decade or seven, and watch us continue to struggle with the same diseases and no vaccines or cures.
And our current rate of population growth isn't making that job any easier for anyone.
You obviously have not been paying attention. Every first world country has reason to be concerned about how slow their population is growing. Europe has negative population growth. Additionally, every industrialized nation has structured their retirement systems on the assumption that those working will provide the resources for those who have retired to live a comfortable life.
Concerned? This isn't some shallow discussion about how China and Indias growth is forcing more and more outsourcing. First world or third world, what the hell is the difference when we have a finite amount of resources for all of us, and we managed to tack on another billion inhabitants on this tiny rock in record time(yeah, we even beat the baby "boomer" generation). And those estimates are slowing, but by a tiny fraction, and not near the rate we ultimately need to survive. So what ultimately happens when Governments are in charge of managing limited resources and we find that a natural rate of death isn't enough to sustain life? Take a guess. (I'll give you a hint. Evil shit happens.)
And that last comment about retirement systems is laughable when you look at the state of Social Security. I'm certainly not counting on that to even exist a few decades from now, much less get a penny back from it.
You, also, seem to be under the impression that once a disease is cured that no one will ever get it again. When we develop a cure for cancer, you will continually have people who need that cure. Cancer is not going to disappear when a cure is developed. It is just that people who get it will get cured. The other problem with your way of thinking is that you seem to think that someone who has been cured of cancer will never get it again. Since cancer is primarily the result of a person's own cells going rogue, that seems improbable.
If it seems improbable to you, then perhaps you should take a closer look at Antineoplastons, and how they could be developed into literally a preventative treatment (vitamin if you will) against most cancers.
Then you can take a look at the man behind that discovery, and the absolute relentless attack against him for merely finding a better treatment(not a cure) for many of our deadliest cancers. An attack brought forth no doubt by an industry acting as a whole to protect its profits.
OK, you believe in quackery. Yeah, you can take a look at the man behind antineoplastons and see someone who is eager to take advantage of anyone who is gullible enough to give him money. First clue that he is a quack, nobody else can reproduce his results. He is the sort of guy who was pushing laetrile in the 70s.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
OK, you believe in quackery. Yeah, you can take a look at the man behind antineoplastons and see someone who is eager to take advantage of anyone who is gullible enough to give him money. First clue that he is a quack, nobody else can reproduce his results. He is the sort of guy who was pushing laetrile in the 70s.
Perhaps you are right. Perhaps not. But there is one rather odd fact to consider there. Seems rather strange that those investing a considerable amount of time and money to try and silence that "quack" would not have gone through the effort over many years had there not been an actual valid threat to the industry. That logic flows regardless of what is being scrutinized.
> I bring up all those other diseases because I believe we've either found a cure for them, or we've come a LOT farther than we are today,
On what basis do you believe this (not that the cure is being suppressed, but that the cure has already been invented)?
> Those are also most of the diseases that keep the population numbers from exploding.
Really? Very few people die of the common cold, and herpes tends to not kill at all, nor does it have a chance to make you infertile like some other STDs. MS is not infectious and quite rare (much too rare to have a significant impact on population growth), and the first symptoms start showing in the late thirties/early forties, by which time many people already have children. Cancer also mostly affects old people who have already had a chance to reproduce, so once again population growth is largely unaffected. As for HIV, with modern treatment life expectancy is between 20 to 50 years for newly diagnosed patients, and with proper treatment there is only a 1% or 2% chance of passing it on from mother to child. Furthermore HIV is more prevalent amongst homosexual males, who were quite unlikely to make a significant contribution to population growth anyway. While HIV is very common in some parts of Africa, in the rest of the world it's very uncommon.
In short, none of these diseases result in a significant decrease in population growth, because they're either not dangerous, too rare, or primarily affect people who already have children. In addition, individuals who are affected by some of these diseases have to take treatment that is very expensive compared to letting them live a few years longer and die of other causes, so there is not even a financial incentive for 'the government' to suppress a cure.
As for Burzynski, it appears nobody has been able to reproduce his results. How do you explain this? Perhaps everybody who isn't a layman is involved in this grand conspiracy of yours?
People said the same thing about laetrile.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Evidence, please. Including some basic physics for the detector.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Radiologists don't really invent treatments either, they mostly focus on imaging, so his opinion (and thus your anecdote) is irrelevant.