Anti-Ebola Drug ZMapp Makes Clean Sweep: 18 of 18 Monkeys Survive Infection

Scientific American reports, based on a study published today in Nature, that ZMapp, the drug that has been used to treat seven patients during the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa, can completely protect monkeys against the virus, research has found. ... The drug — a cocktail of three purified immune proteins, or monoclonal antibodies, that target the Ebola virus — has been given to seven people: two US and three African health-care workers, a British nurse and a Spanish priest. The priest and a Liberian health-care worker who got the drug have since died. There is no way to tell whether ZMapp has been effective in the patients who survived, because they received the drug at different times during the course of their disease and received various levels of medical care. NPR also has an interview with study lead Gary Kobinger, who says that (very cautious) human trials are in the works, and emphasizes the difficulites of producing the drug in quantity.

Comments

Good news everybody

[MRe_nl]

Project 18 monkeys is a go.
I for one welcome our simian overlords.

Re:Good news everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct, 50 white people infected with virus.

Initiate program.

Re: Good news everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem, reaction, solution

Move along , nothing to see here ....

Re:Good news everybody

[Hartree]

"like lions and tigers keep their prey genetically healthy by picking off the bad ones, but you got a drug that keeps them away"

I don't think ZMapp is a very good lion or tiger repellant.

Re: Good news everybody

[O('_')O_Bush]

"Bad ones"

That isn't how evolution works. What you meant was genetically less fit to resist predation by lions and tigers before having a chance to breed if and only if lions and tigers are a significant cause of that species not being able to breed in comparison to other factors.

I, for one, don't give a shit about genetic fitness against Ebola. Thinking that somehow these people (or animals) "deserve" to be weeded out because they are "bad" in the sense there is something wrong with them is completely unfounded, and is nothing more than blaming the victim.

Or trolling.

Re:Good news everybody

[Beck_Neard]

If you like Ebola you are more than welcome to go to Africa and try out your 'genetic fitness' for yourself...

Re: Good news everybody

[Anonanonaon]

Thank-you! It's nice to see people posting sensible thoughts.

Re:Good news everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget 12 monkeys, 18 monkeys, or even 100 monkeys. I'm still anxiously awaiting another test of the infinite monkey hypothesis.

The last time a test was attempted, we just got a few letters typed over and over and over, and the typewriters ended up full of poo. :(

Re: Good news everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh thank god the primates are safe!!!

Re:Good news everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but if we're lucky it'll be a cure for beta.

Re:Good news everybody

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time a test was attempted, we just got a few letters typed over and over and over, and the typewriters ended up full of poo. :(

It's underway, we call this project Internet. You will have no trouble finding the complete works of William Shakespeare online. Still haven't found a way to get rid of the poop flinging and random typing though.

Re:Good news everybody

[Ol Olsoc]

. I'm still anxiously awaiting another test of the infinite monkey hypothesis.

The last time a test was attempted, we just got a few letters typed over and over and over, and the typewriters ended up full of poo. :(

Essentially a J.K. Rowling novel.

Re:Good news everybody

[ultranova]

Drugs like this are what meddle in the affairs of intelligent parasites trying to shape and control populations.

Virii are not the least bit intelligent by any reasonable definition. And Ebola doesn't seem to be causing any evolutionary pressure except for a resistance to itself.

However, it seems this epidemic has exposed the lingering traces of Social Darwinism exemplified by your post, as well as - once again - demonstrated how they could be a fatal weakness if allowed to remain operative.

Re:Good news everybody

[ruir]

You do not need to go. These fuckers are not imposing mandatory quarantine for people who is coming from infected countries. There have been a couple of scares, who apparently where false. This, and ZMapp trials, and Monsanto buying share into the company developing this vaccine... seems like a plot of 28 days later.

Re: Good news everybody

[sillybilly]

I was talking about the mind control parasites, that cooperate with every living animal in existence. For instance, the parasite teams up with a species of wasp that requires mind controlling a cockroach to lay eggs onto. Another one teams up with a worm vehicle, and helps that worm infect and mind control snails to be eaten by birds, or ants to be eaten by cows. These mind control parasites are also responsible for all human dreams, and things like hearing voices, visions and messages of prophets in the past(Mohammed being the last one b4 they gave up on trying to fulfill prophecies anymore), or human inventions such as much of mathematics, and science, as in only through God are you able to achieve anything. The human + intelligent parasite combo is orders of magnitude more intelligent than a human by itself would be, if there existed a single human who could survive completely sterile, on its own. All life is one through them, as they reside in every living thing, and ensure genetic variability is maintained and no single organism dominates life as a monopoly, vulnerable to complete extinction of life through a monoculture vulnerability mechanism. As it is variety of answers, dumb mutations but also intelligent selection to maintain that variety of answers, or lifeforms, that Life on Earth throws as a single answer at any possible future unknown challenge to its existence. They have been around for billions of years as opposed to most other multicellular life forms like plants and animals. They make life and death decisions such as cancer, aids and ebola, though they too, are not omnipotent. It is this intellgent decision making that I was talking about, as opposed to the dumb Darwin's natural selection, as, if you look in the business world, over and over a single monopoly arises and exterminates all competitors, itself becoming vulnerable to monoculture issues, so why does such a thing not happen with life, as in a single celled organism digesting all other life, and becoming the only species left on the planet, as a monopoly. It's because such a thing is intelligently fought against, by parasites living in you, me, and everything alive around you, smarter than you or me, or at least what you and me would be without them in us. They are not omnipotent, even if they used to pretend so in the past, through the prophets and such. They don't have good answers either, but they are trying. They can only do so much. We, as in Life on Earth, have difficult problems facing us.

Re: Good news everybody

[sillybilly]

Every time you see a zit, that's an unhappy parasite that lives in you, maybe one of the dumb ones or one of the intelligent ones, who knows, but if you tried to kill it you would have very serious other issues, and probably would not succeed. The best thing to do is not to fight them but to team up with them, unless of course you are sick from Ebola. And there is such a thing as a fight, as between mind controlled ant tribes and such, and they want to maintain fighting skills, because that's another vulnerability of Life on Earth, lack of fighting skills, in case an intergalactic invasion should happen by an even more sentient species at a technological level higher than they have been able to drive humans.

Re:Good news everybody

[sillybilly]

I think I already might have all the diseases that ever been invented, including syphilis, aids, ebola, bubonic plague, anthrax, etc., in me, without me being at fault at acquiring them such as promiscuousness, because I'm not promiscuous at all. As far as I'm concerned I feel better than a whole lot of drug addicts who have lost all their teeth at a young age, for instance. As that's a first line punishment of idiots like that, you can almost always recognize a drug addict by bad teeth, by bad flora in their mouth, which is the most genetically varied region in the entire human body, there are more species of life in your mouth than anywhere else, including your skin or deep inside your anus.
People sometimes look at me and drop me clues like people have been living with AIDS for centuries and did fine, as in, if they were implying that I'm supposed to have AIDS, because they willfully and knowingly infected me, and look I act just fine and I'm not sick. So they give me a job where I get x-rayed standing right next to a thin walled aluminum garage door, get carbon monoxide gassed from a propane direct flame heater, the whole building is extremely cold in the winter because it's a small business, and there is no money, and of course I get slack on attendance from a place that constantly gets me sick. Might have something to do with Chinese investors into the US tulip-mania-pyramid-scheme housing market. Hey, I'm not angry or bitter about it, I just know how people are. But still, what the fuck do realtors contribute to the economy, in a creative way, other than bloodsucking a massive cut out of it, because the transactions they handle are so massive? Life on Earth should not revolve around housing issues. As in this youtube video, we gonna pay rent today! : http://youtu.be/Ol2DedEhOGI
People have been living with AIDS for centuries and did fine. If the parasites living in them decided to try to maintain them alive anyway, then yes. Same with things like bubonic plague, as even that had survivors that were fully infected. But even they can only do so much in sustaining somebody under total assault from every direction, and sometimes, sadly, it's just not worth the effort. For instance, they can manage health symptoms of infection, but they cannot keep alive somebody who's head just been chopped by a guillotine, or heart shot through with a bullet. They know bio tech, but they are not omnipotent when it comes to mechanical damage. Though they manifest themselves in mechanical damage too when they mind control and send someone on a shooting spree, unexpected out of nowhere, to selectively pick off certain people. For every shooting rampage of randomly shot people, you should look deep into why those specific people were shot, and if they were not so, what kind of consequences or bad things the future would have held. Every time I see news of another act of terror or shooting rampage, I take a close looks at who the victims were, and sometimes it's nice to see facial appearances, as a lot of people have stereo types based on face, like you know someone looking a certain way extremely well how they'd behave, then another one that's a lookalike, that behaves completely differently due to life experience circumstances, but there is a common set of traits that's common in all of them, and you can assume that the next person that looked just like that will differ on behavior on what they differed from each other, but be the same on behavior that was common in all of them. This way you can kind of know and understand people around you, which helps you coexist with them better, or know how to make them happy better.

Re: Good news everybody

[sillybilly]

Exactly. That's the other side of the story, the humanity part. So how do you balance humanity with the need for genetic fitness.
In a village there may be born a retard, or a malformed, deformed person. Or a really ugly one, but that's a bit up in the air, because everyone can be beautiful. But this is how a village goes about it: if you're defective, we wish you never were born in the first place(, as in a stillborn baby that ended up barely making it, and has serious issues throughout life from it, if we knew it before conception, we would have not willingly created such an individual born to suffer, instead we would have picked what we think are genetically healthy and happy people, but us assuming to know that, to know something we don't really know, and playing God picking and choosing what kind of people should be born, needs extreme care and understanding of our limits of understanding), so we might wish you were never born in the first place, as a stillborn who barely made it, or someone doomed to suffer, even from simple things such as being too retarded, but if you happened to be born, we respect your rights as a human being equal to the rest of us, and treat you just like we would treat even the best of us, within limits of course. Everyone rejoices in hanging their eyes on beautiful people, and in villages you almost never find beautiful people, instead, if you live in one of them, at first everyone is ugly, and though time you acquire the taste of knowing that everyone is beautiful, and whoever you meet like them in the world around you, that look like them, they become beautiful too. So in a village, how the retard, or village idiot, or the person lowest ranking on the hierarchy, similar to how an omega wolf in a wolf pack, so the way that person fares, and his emotional and economic well being speaks volumes about the rest of the village. If he's happy, you know there is love in the village, and chances are you yourself are neither at the very top, nor at the very bottom as this poor fellow is, would fare at least as well as the one on the very bottom. In this sense it's almost a necessity to have a reject, or omega, or idiot in every village, and sometimes these idiots are simply strange, not totally retarded, might be smarter than everybody else in a lot of respect, but they feel first hand on their own skin any kind of hatred manifesting in the village, and people don't put up a show or try to front before them, they don't really care what the idiot thinks about them, so he gets a raw picture of things as they are, not as they are pretending to be to other people, and he can pull strings and manipulate the well being of a village more than anyone else. Without a village structure, like in the modern world where all old people are shipped off to a nursing home to live out the rest of their lives without being able to be the omegas and alphas of the village at the same time, so without a village structure that functions well, there is no good purpose for village idiots.
Sometimes though they are just plain dumb or plain suffering in aches and pain in genetic malfunctions, and we hope that they too are on the same page that we would not want 99 of 100 people to be like them in the village, but they too wish to remain in the 1% zone, and wish to see beautiful, physically fit, smart, good personality, genetically healthy so to speak people be the norm. In a sense they develop a sense of identity. I saw a PBS production on midgets. Some of them require surgeries throughout their lives due to genetic issues, they constantly suffer in pain because of genetic issues, and they know it's genetic issues, and they don't wish the pain unto anyone. They also tend to congregate together, and marry within their group. If you ask them whether it would be a good idea not to have midgets in the world, as most of them are genetically unfit compared to more average size humans, if you put them through some sort of genetic fitness test, they will object vehemently to that. Being a midget is their identity, they are

Re: Good news everybody

[sillybilly]

I'm glad that I can go under a pseudonym and maintain anonymity to where I can write shit like that without anybody knowing who I really am :)

Re:Good news everybody

[Reziac]

It was supposed to be 12 monkeys. Idiots!

Pretty impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

But... did the monkeys were given laptop computers, did they get any Shakespeare?

Re:Pretty impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

All they got were instructions to steal a car or spread terror with the Bubonic plague.

Re:Pretty impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, impressive. DARPA develops disease, CIA spreads it, then the big pharma profits on it. The plague, the smallpox, the 1918 flu, AIDS and now E-bo-la. Damn the ZOG.

Human Subjects

[eric31415927]

When the human testing starts, should it be old people first? afftected-continent people first? family-receives-high-payment people first?

I think they should be volunteers at the very least.

Re:Human Subjects

[Galactic Dominator]

I think it should be infected people.

Re:Human Subjects

[Anonymous Coward]

By law in the U.S. (and most other countries), as well as health care and research codes of ethics, study participants must voluntarily provide informed consent to receive experimental treatments. It's extremely difficult to prove the voluntary part for at-risk populations including people who are elderly, poor, or undereducated. Studies of these populations require additional oversight and safeguards.

Source: I'm qualified to perform research with participants who have linguistic or cognitive impairments and did so during my M.S. program and in my first job after graduation.

Re:Human Subjects

[ThatAblaze]

When the human testing starts, should it be old people first? afftected-continent people first? family-receives-high-payment people first?

I think they should be volunteers at the very least.

If you RTFA you'll notice that human testing has already started.

Re:Human Subjects

[fluffy99]

I think they should be volunteers at the very least.

Given the 90% mortality rate of ebola, I suspect nearly anyone infected will want to volunteer. The problem is that the drug can't be mass produced yet. 10s of doses takes months to produce using the current method, which is genetically modified tobacco plants (bit of irony there). A massive influx of resource is needed to ramp up production.

Re:Human Subjects

[Noah Haders]

i read the fatality rate in this epidemic has been more around 40%.

Re:Human Subjects

[BigDukeSix]

When the human testing starts, should it be old people first? afftected-continent people first? family-receives-high-payment people first?

Real clinical trials do not work like this. If you want to do a real trial, you first have to establish a team and treatment center that can administer your therapy and collect the data you need. You then establish EXCLUSION criteria, i.e., people who will not be included in the trial (usually old people, who have an annoying tendency to die, and children, because sick kids scare the shit out of most doctors). *Everybody* else who comes to the center, who has the disease, gets offered enrollment in the trial. It's up to them if they want to participate.

Anything else will get you laughed at, at the very least.

Re:Human Subjects

[ShanghaiBill]

i read the fatality rate in this epidemic has been more around 40%.

The lowered lethality is actually a bad thing. It means people aren't getting as sick, are staying ambulatory longer, and are spreading the disease to more additional people. With a lethality rate of 90% a disease will likely burn out fast. At 40%, it has more time to spread, and can kill far more people in total. Despite the lower lethality, this outbreak has killed more than any other. If the virus continues to adapt to human hosts, and the lethality falls to 10 or 20%, we are in big trouble.

Re:Human Subjects

[LordLimecat]

So apparently do the people making the decision, so Im glad that all of the important people here are agreed.

Re:Human Subjects

[Khyber]

"In reality, the worst case scenario now involves an immune host/carrier. "

Looks like in reality you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. Such a person/vector would be a pathologist's fucking wet dream to forming a vaccine against the disease in the first fucking place.

Re:Human Subjects

[Noah Haders]

Looks like in reality you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. Such a person/vector would be a pathologist's fucking wet dream to forming a vaccine against the disease in the first fucking place.

like in left for dead

Re: Human Subjects

[Anonymous Coward]

So the mortality rate is not 90% - the media is, as usual, misquoting the figure. They actually quote was something more like "a mortality rate of up to 90%" because one outbreak has had a mortality rate this high. This particular outbreak, as of yesterday, only had a mortality rate of 51%. Other outbreaks have different rates depending on local conditions, such as how good the care the patients receive is. I think the cumulative for all outbreaks since the 70's is about 65% IIRC.

Re:Human Subjects

[sexconker]

"In reality, the worst case scenario now involves an immune host/carrier. "

Looks like in reality you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. Such a person/vector would be a pathologist's fucking wet dream to forming a vaccine against the disease in the first fucking place.

You watch too much TV.
You can't just find "patient 0", or "the primordial sample" as TNT's shitty show calls it, and then magically get a cure shat out.
You can't just find some schlub who's immune and magically figure out why and make a vaccine to immunize other people.

Re:Human Subjects

[zAPPzAPP]

The whole point of such a person would be, they are not showing symptoms,so how the duck are you going to find them?

Re: Human Subjects

[ColdWetDog]

So the mortality rate is not 90% - the media is, as usual, misquoting the figure. They actually quote was something more like "a mortality rate of up to 90%" because one outbreak has had a mortality rate this high. This particular outbreak, as of yesterday, only had a mortality rate of 51%. Other outbreaks have different rates depending on local conditions, such as how good the care the patients receive is. I think the cumulative for all outbreaks since the 70's is about 65% IIRC.

And that number is likely to be higher than reality since people who aren't very sick will be unwilling to present for care and, given the poor state of public health infrastructure in that neck of the woods, population surveillance is very hard.

They will have a better idea in the upcoming months when they can screen for Ebola antibodies in the general population.

Re:Human Subjects

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of effort is put into finding root sources for infections like this one. If an immune carrier is the source, this carrier will eventually be discovered. It's mostly a question of time until enough information has been gathered. Such a carrier would be leaving a highly visible trail of infected patients after all.

Re:Human Subjects

[PrimaryConsult]

Of course not, but let me put it in sysadmin terms:
System a is having a problem
System b with a slightly different configuration is avoiding the problem

When trying to solve the "problem" the normal way (Documentation, Google) fails usually you start making "a" look more like "b" until the problem goes away. Or are you saying that finding a working example of what you are trying to accomplish is not extremely valuable?

Re:Human Subjects

[sexconker]

Of course not, but let me put it in sysadmin terms:
System a is having a problem
System b with a slightly different configuration is avoiding the problem

When trying to solve the "problem" the normal way (Documentation, Google) fails usually you start making "a" look more like "b" until the problem goes away. Or are you saying that finding a working example of what you are trying to accomplish is not extremely valuable?

I'm saying that what you said is fucking retarded horseshit based on watching too much TV.

"In reality, the worst case scenario now involves an immune host/carrier. "

Looks like in reality you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. Such a person/vector would be a pathologist's fucking wet dream to forming a vaccine against the disease in the first fucking place.

Your bizarre attempt to deflect with a shitty analogy doesn't change that (You think human immune systems are like computers? You think computers are fixed via documentation and google as opposed to diagnostics? You think you can make a human with ebola more like a person immune to ebola how, exactly?)

Re:Human Subjects

[PrimaryConsult]

You might want to learn to read usernames; I'm not the GP.

And unless you have a ", MD" after your name, you have no more qualification to discuss this than the rest of us, so why don't you take your profanity laced drivel and shove it up your ass.

Re:Human Subjects

[RockDoctor]

When the human testing starts, should it be old people first? afftected-continent people first? family-receives-high-payment people first?

Trolls first.

I think they should be volunteers at the very least.

Your application as a volunteer has been accepted. Your Ebola infection should shortly be delivered and the drugs (or placebo ; not your choice which you get) will be delivered in 10 days time, by when you should have started to develop symptoms. Please take it to a nearby clinic and pay someone to inject you. Your anonymity will, of course, be protected by us, though we cannot speak for every other person you meet, including the taxi driver who takes you to the clinic.

Main Problem

[no-body]

with Ebola control is health care infra-structure in affected countries. A far cry from what would be necessary to contain further spread. There was one report on a radio station that there are like 10 doctors in a whole country (Africa, forgot the name).

Even if you have the best drug available defeating the virus in a day, it won't help at all under those circumstances - spread by body fluids from infected individuals.

The outcome can only be guessed...

Re:Main Problem

[Galactic Dominator]

There was one report on a radio station that there are like 10 doctors in a whole country

That would NPR's report as well which stated 50 doctors total in Liberia after some of left during the beginning of the infection.

http://wvpe.org/post/who-warns...

Of course considering the mess Liberia has been in for 20+ years this outbreak is relatively minor and only receiving attention due to sensationalism.

Re:Main Problem

[fluffy99]

Of course considering the mess Liberia has been in for 20+ years this outbreak is relatively minor and only receiving attention due to sensationalism.

No, it's receiving a lot of attention because the outbreak is not contained to a small remote village as with previous outbreaks. It's not contained at this point (partly due to the lack of govt in these areas), and there is a significant population in danger. The fairly long incubation period of up to a few weeks means this could easily be carried back to major populated areas and spread like wildfire.

Re:Main Problem

[phantomfive]

Indeed. I read a report not long ago that said doctors are dying in Africa because they don't have enough gloves.

Re:Main Problem

[Noah Haders]

it's not just the extent of medical infrastructure, but also its robustness. one reason it has spread so rapidly in nigeria is that all the doctors are on strike. the doctor's union has been striking for 6 months to get higher wages (seriously, yes). this is the problem with centralized health care! (troll bait)

Re:Main Problem

[Anne Thwacks]

Nigeria has a centralised health care system? SInce when? It did not have one in February 2014 when I was there.

In any case, so far, the only people infected in Nigeria are the health care professionals that treated a Liberian who arrived infected, and the families of those health care workers.

Disclaimer: two of the deceased (a doctor and a nurse) were known to a colleague of my partner.

Re:Main Problem

[Noah Haders]

i don't know what centralized health care really means but i do know that doctors in nigeria have a union and that they are on strike and that there are about a dozen cases in nigeria.

Re:Main Problem

[ruir]

It depends on what you call centralised system or medical infra-structure. I remember fully well that when I was living in an African country a few years ago, you had like 50 doctors for the whole country, most of which in the capital, and maybe 5000 witch doctors.

oops redux

[Galactic Dominator]

you forgot to read the summary or the article

Anti-Ebola Drug ZMapp Makes Clean Sweep: 18 of 18 Monkeys Survive Infection

No more monkey deaths.

[Patent Lover]

Finally the monkeys are safe. Praise be.

Good news for the wealthiers

[manu0601]

Good news for the ones that can afford the treatment, either personally or through their government. Death for the others.

Re:Good news for the wealthiers

[CanadianMacFan]

Of course that is pretty much the case now. If you are poor and in a third world country you are pretty much dead but if you are rich and from a first world country then you can afford to be flown back by private plane to get medical treatment.

and is the usa the last resort jail / prison healt

[Joe_Dragon]

and is the usa the last resort jail / prison healthcare system will cover it as well.

Somewhat Less Than 50 White People...

[IonOtter]

Looks like The Onion got this one wrong.

Experts: Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away

I suppose it's a commentary on the state of the world that The Onion is so often inadvertently right with their headlines.

Re:Somewhat Less Than 50 White People...

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like The Onion got this one wrong.

Experts: Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away

I suppose it's a commentary on the state of the world that The Onion is so often inadvertently right with their headlines.

Why white people? What I mean by that is we should be certainly be concerned that there is far less urgency about fighting Ebola as long as only Africans are suffering but why isn't the onus on China and India to help solve this? Especially now that China is casting itself as the saviour of Africa. These countries consider themselves major powers so let them carry a bit of the burden, it's not as if their people are immune against Ebola.

Re:and is the usa the last resort jail / prison he

[manu0601]

Considering the growing fraction of US population that live in prisons, that seems fair.

Donations...

[Kaenneth]

Who/Where can we donate to help get basic supplies to the doctors in Africa; without 98% of it disappearing into 'overhead'?

Re:Donations...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Sir Kaenneth,

Please permit me to make your acquaintance in so informal a manner. This is necessitated by my urgent need to reach a dependable and trust worthy foreign partner to transfer international donations to Africa. My name is Dr. William Monroe, colleague of esteemed Ebola expert Dr. John Shumejda of Nigeria.

Please sir, as a humanitarian, if you can wire $189,000,000.00 USD to my Bank of Bahamas account, I can assure you that 98% of that contribution will not disappear into the 'overhead' of which you speak.

Yours Sincerely,
Dr. William Monroe

Re:Donations...

[mhotchin]

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontiéres (MSF)
http://www.doctorswithoutborde...

Re:Donations...

[OneAhead]

Yeah, they're the first NGO that started fighting this outbreak, and have the biggest presence in the area. Which is not a surprise given that they're one of very few (possibly even the only one) equipped to deal with biosafety level 4 diseases in the wild. With only a little bit of hyperbole, one could say they moved in where a lot of other NGOs moved out (and rightly so).

That said, all their qualified personnel and relevant equipment is already invested into this outbreak, so a significant part of any money you donate to them right now will go to their other programs - mainly Syria at the moment. However, don't let that stop you. Apart from Syria obviously needing some attention too, MSF is pretty efficient in the way thy use their money and their approach is uncompromisingly impartial and science-driven, to the point of being shunned by deep religious conservatives (*gasp*, promoting the use of condoms) and people with political agendas (*gasp*, daring to criticize the dire humanitarian circumstances in Palestine). Which explains why they're relatively unpopular in the USA compared to the rest of the western world.

ZMapp experiments done on tobacco plants.

[leftie]

If they have practice gengengeering on some thing, do it on something that can be safely erased if we fuck it all up.

They got all kinds of varieties of tobacco plants they can experiment on, we won't miss one of them

We can erase the entire tobacco supply and never cry one tear if there is a monstrous fuck-up.

Re:ZMapp experiments done on tobacco plants.

[Artifakt]

That depends on whether the monstrous fuck-up is just extinction of one plant variety or Triffidized tobacco.

Re:ZMapp experiments done on tobacco plants.

[TapeCutter]

I don't care if your bleeding from the eyeballs, leave my cigarettes alone!

50% better!

[joe3barrera]

That 50% better than 12 out of Twelve Monkeys!

herpdurp

[flayzernax]

http://deusex.wikia.com/wiki/B...

Risk Management

[bill_mcgonigle]

Look, I'm all for getting as much Zmapp to patients as is possible. I think a lot of people are agreement on this.

But we also need to do something about the effed up process of the approval of drugs and vaccines for these deadly diseases.

I'm thinking specifically about the malaria vaccine that has been known to be effective since '96/'97, but which has been held up for extended testing trials by (IIRC) the British drug regulators, who again put a hold on it this spring because it might not be entirely effective in newborn infants.

Meanwhile two million children are dying every year from malaria. This is a really, really, really, screwed up situation, and we have an ethical obligation to do what we can to put an end to these processes.

Even if the latest delay is "only" three months, that's a half million kids or so. It's unconscionable how poor the risk management analysis is - the perfect can be the very, very deadly enemy of the good. And so can drug-agency bureaucrats.

Re:Risk Management

[Nemyst]

That's easy to say when the sample of drugs you have is those that have passed approval. If the requirements are relaxed, it's very hard to say what would happen without having access to information only the FDA has.

Perhaps nothing would happen. That'd be great, but it's also a gamble. It's possible that the relaxed requirements mean a side-effect slips through unnoticed, causing as great or greater harm later in the future. It's unlikely, but it's possible, and it only takes one for everyone to panic. Probably the best example we have of what could happen is Thalidomide.

Re:Risk Management

[Kijori]

Do you have a source for that malaria fact? I just wonder whether there's maybe more to it than just its effectiveness in newborns.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes sir! You done gots my vote!

Peer review

[Anonymous Coward]

"But other researchers say that the findings should be interpreted with caution, because monkeys with Ebola are not a perfect analogue for humans with the disease. “I don’t think the data support that this drug is effective, even in the animal model, in individuals with advanced Ebola disease,” says infectious-disease physician Charles Chiu at the University of California, San Francisco."

This is the most important part of the story... what flaws do other experts suspect in the design or analysis? They also fail to mention that the monkeys that died were sacrificed due to high "clinical scores" (which I could not find defined in the paper), they did not die of the disease. Also, in the paper it says: "This study was not blinded...". I would bet the clinical score is a subjective measure, so clearly these results are questionable.

I'm not saying this treatment will not work, but once again it appears we have overblown claims from nature. I really don't get the no-blinding + euthanasia determined by (probably subjective) clinical score combo.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

man, i love how slashdot is so barren nowadays that a comment like this stays at one point.

The Last Ship

[Anonanonaon]

Anybody else following that curious TV show?

It's all about humanity-killing viruses and includes experimental monkeys, and voluntary human test subjects dying 10% of the time while trying out the new super-vaccine, (so bravely concocted by a cute scientist babe while sailing under the buff, gruff manly man uber-patriotic US navy?)

Now, given the superb timing of that show in conjunction with this latest (opportunist's cash bonanza) virus threat out here in the real world, one can ask quite justifiably...

Is "The Last Ship" an example of willful sculpting of public opinion and receptiveness to what will certainly be a very expensive jab, or was it a subconscious up-bubbling of worries and fears from the collective human psyche? (Kind of like all those zombie films).

I'm leaning towards cynicism, myself. -Heck, it even has Evil Russians. So.., social engineering for the win!

Re:oops

[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely because he got the drug too late, but thanks for being a dick!

Another win for bad science!

[EireannX]

From TFA:

All animals that received the drug lived, no matter when their treatment started; three monkeys that were not treated died.

We're not told the size of the control group, but if it were 18 monkeys to match the treated group, you had a very hardy set of monkeys or a less aggressive strain of the virus.

You're doing it wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

In this line of work, we use 12 monkeys.

And if somebody shows up looking for their army, listen to him....

It is tainted

[m0s3m8n]

Now don't you U.S. military haters go out there and use this drug. After all it was partially funded with U.S. tax dollars via the Army.

Disclaimer

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the drug come with a disclaimer which notes that in some small number of cases, the drug may cause Ebola?