From live broadcast voice interview BBC R5
Infected US nationals have been given in-development via IV experimental ex-mouse and ex-tobacco plant anti-bodies of some kind, binds to blood circulating Ebola virus, body recognises bound combination as bad, removes from bloodstream, response inside hour.
To do this an official must have given permission or perhaps unlawfully, patients (medically qualified) apparently assented.
I hope this news is correct. Hope some more and no dire side effects.
The situation in west Africa essentially out of control, extreme.
Wire news
Sierra Leone, Liberia deploy troops as Ebola toll hits 887
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/08/05/uk-healh-ebola-africa-idUKKBN0G41D820140805
If it does work there is going to be heart rending on what to do. Seems to me that time is against any meaningful deployment in Africa if the outbreak follows previous patterns of dying out. We don’t know why or critically the reservoir which harbours the virus, assumed to be wild animals.
Success would be a massive boost for the industry.
On the hoof post by Tim
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Good news if it works.
You might take a look here:
http://www.ktvb.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/05/ebola-fighting-compound-created-using-tobacco/13642819/
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A Kentucky company used local tobacco to help produce an experimental serum to fight Ebola, which may help save two American aid workers stricken with the deadly disease.
David Howard, a spokesman for Reynolds American Services, said Owensboro-based Kentucky BioProcessing complied with a request from Emory University Hospital in Atlanta and Samaritan’s Purse this week “to provide a limited amount” of the compound, called ZMapp.
Kentucky BioProcessing, which was acquired by North Carolina-based Reynolds American Inc. in January, does contract work for many clients, including ZMapp maker Mapp Biopharmaceutical of San Diego.
Howard couldn’t confirm that the compound was used on the aid workers, and Emory officials didn’t respond by deadline to a call or email seeking confirmation. But The Associated Press, CNN and other media outlets reported that the aid workers have gotten the serum and have improved.
And there is some more information here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-05/ebola-drug-made-from-tobacco-plant-saves-u-s-aid-workers.html
Apparently the research was done as a possible measure to counter Ebola being used for bio-warfare. A lot of good info here.
Prediction — If this reaches the street people of New York City it will spread quickly through them, through the catacombs of the subway system (the unofficial home of the homeless), and then via the prostitutes of both genders to the highest penthouses on Park Avenue. Those who choose to “ride the blinds” to a safer haven will potentially distribute the disease to urban centers across North America passing it on to untraceable fellow travelers in a square law fashion.
It is a bad time for hundreds of thousands of “dreamers”, unemployed, homeless, infested and diseased, and with little English, to show up with expectations of a better life.
Meanwhile back in the UK, Dr John Ashton, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, compared the situation to the early years of the AIDS epidemic and attacked the “moral bankruptcy” of a system which gives drug companies no reason to invest in treatments for “powerless minority groups”.
So money should go to developing drugs for a relatively rare, but no less deadly disease.
If the drug companies had any sense they would have research on the backburner for most of the rare but possibly devastating diseases known. After all in this ever more interconnected world, it is not if a new epidemic will break out but when. The major problem is big pharma requires shareholder profits from its research. As the good doctor alludes to it is a cunumdrum that requires more investigation.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/11010135/If-Ebola-was-in-the-UK-wed-cure-it-says-leading-doctor.html
Monoclonal antibodies aren’t new. I think they first had them in the late 80’s and everyone in the medical profession was optimistic that this was it, the silver bullet. All you have to do is re-engineer part of the antibody to be specific for a disease/cancer cell/leukaemia cell/ virus and you’ve won!
I’m not sure what happened, its a very specific field of virology/immunology. They have been used but oh so slowly…. This is fantastic news if true and not media hype. I mean if you have a working monoclonal antibody for a virus that’s it, game over.
Your immune system has a number of cells which ‘wander lonely as a cloud through vein and artery’ looking for chemical signals which indicate alien protein i.e. alien cells. These could be bacteria or viruses or your own cells that have mutated. Once a macrophage homes in on the flagged cell, it’s history. Macrophages are big beastie cells and circulate all the time, they are your usual first line of defence against a new invasion too. They have a built in memory for various ‘alien’ proteins/antigens that they will attack each and every time they encounter them. BUT they can also respond to new proteins if they are highlighted by antibodies. An normal antibody will be able to attach to a small closely defined number of ‘antigenic’ proteins and in doing so it looks for specific receptors on the ‘antigen’ protein which perfectly fit its profile, like a piece of a puzzle, then its like sticking a dinner bell on the cell and ringing it. Lymphocytes normally fulfil the role of antibody manufacturing unit, they are clever little fellows who examine an alien protein and then create specific antibodies to it, they then pheromonically pass the knowledge to other lymphocytes which then start producing them too. Problem is that this can take up to ten days and you haven’t got ten days with a haemorrhagic fever. Crudely put these viruses are like taking the top off a person and sticking a hand held food processor inside, zoom for 30 seconds, then put the top back on without rapid treatment you’ve had it.
A monoclonal antibody short cuts the system producing the specific antibody on demand and in large quantities. Each and every ebola cell has to be tagged by one so that the macrophages can go to work. So that’s an awful lot of MC antibodies. At the moment the macrophages don’t recognise ebola as a threat -well it is a bat virus so you can’t blame them- the moment the monoclonal antibodies get there its Dinner Time! I’m no longer working in microbiology but I think that’s the gist of it.
The virus appears to be spreading quite quickly in Africa and the conditions there are not conducive to the Aid Workers not becoming infected. The problem will be Air transportation of the desease out of the current area, they are saying it has already reached Nigeria.
As has been said there in insufficient quarantine in place for it burn out naturally as it has done in the past.
I have been saying for months that this is where the time & money wasted on Climate should be going, there are many humanitarian issues that are desperate for investment & research.
Good reactions in the comments, worries me doing quick posts.
Me_Again, ah, that was the phrase where my mind blanked, monoclonal antibodies. Medical heroics will no doubt be going on. It’s nice when someone can write from a better position of knowing.
Widely in the west there has been a rapid forgetting of infectious diseases within society and including simple measures at restricting conditions where spread is enhanced. Society is setting itself up in this and many other ways for learning a second lesson.
Ill ventilated enclosed public spaces seem to me to be particularly unwise.
I caught the tale end of infectious, don’t go there. Saw the fear in others too.
@tchannon
I confess to have considerable interest in infection vectors and did in fact input to the government regarding the disaster planning that preceded the damp squib pandemic of 2008-9. The current danger is that the ebola leaves the African continent were it has so far been imprisoned by its own success.
The attack profile will be very different to influenza if it should escape Africa. With influenza you get a ‘stone in the pond’ effect with the ripples spreading outwards from what appear to be index cases, eventually all joining together.
With ebola it will be more like a shotgun effect with small clusterss of cases popping up here and there with no apparent linkage. Each group will be isolated rapidly and everyone in direct contact located and quarantined BUT it won’t work because there’s always someone who’ll slip through the net. I would see this as a dreadful but slow burning disease, one of the biggest problems of which is that it exhibits some flu like symptoms when it manifests -thus readily passes by touch-sweat to those who initially care for the victim and unwittingly become the next.
The use of these monoclonals is a God send if they work because it will reduce the death toll but I’d expect they need administering fairly promptly or the damage done may be irreparable, the trick will be to distribute them well enough to be of use, and no doubt they won’t be cheap.
Lastly, I’ve heard it said that ebola doesn’t change. Not true. It just hasn’t previously had the opportunity that this outbreak provides. Always before it has been in the deep dark jungle and well out of the way, pretty easy to isolate and let it burn out. Thus not having this opportunity provided by massive cell division which is where adaptation occurs. Ebola is trying to became a human disease. To do that it needs to be less effective at killing us, same with H5N1. If you are too virulent then your host dies before you are able to adapt and spread yourself. Influenza ‘A’s are a great example because they start off as Avian flu and then over a period of time, having infected multiple people, they mutate and become more adapted to the host species, they then kill still, but much less often. Ebola needs to adapt and this is its best opportunity so far. If it becomes better able to pass from person to person, say by aerosol from a sneeze or cough then it will behave more like flu. However something going from 90% mortality down to even 10% -hugely optimistic- would kill the same % as the Spanish flu [10% of world population] but in a much shorter period of time because of human mobility. It would depend on its strike rate [the % of people who get it in any one population]. Anyway I’m sure you can do the maths yourself if you have a strike rate of 50% and a mortality of 10-20 or 30%, there ain’t enough body bags on the planet.
“The current danger is that ebola leaves the African continent WHERE it has…..”
sorry typo
Another good source of information on trial drug and anything else disease related
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/08/experimental-ebola-drug-may-have-helped-2-us-patients
It isn’t a drug. Its an antibody.
Not happy.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2014/08/experts-give-new-us-ebola-drug-africans-201485233636516828.html
Supposedly one reason one of the Americans got so sick is that while in Africa he gave a dose of the serum meant for him to a local. The woman apparently did well. That American patient is a college friend of a co-worker in my office and this is anecdotal.
Aljazeera is an interesting voice: authoritative yet deep into conspiracy kookdom. No wonder they liked Gore’s TV network so much they bought it.
Me_Again offers a great summary of the risks that ebola presents. I read a history of typhus that shows how typhus went from obscure to disaster as it became well established across the globe, and then back to obscure.
More on the American doctor who gave the serum to the local patient. There were three vials of the serum. Only was thawed, the American thought he was too far gone to benefit so he put the infected woman in first. When the other vials thawed, he did receive serum in country. He is younger than the infected woman and responded positively and more strongly than the infected woman.
I hate to think what was going through his head, reacting by carrying on, some do. Reminds me of terminal cancer people going into hard radiation areas when a reactor was in deep trouble. Some survived.
Forgotten about typus, indeed it seems to have fallen out of view.
According to this it is endemic in the US but as a bacterium infection it can be treated.
Now here is a thing…
“Using insecticides (10% DDT, 1% malathion, or 1% permethrin)”
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001363.htm
I think I may have mentioned that the internal damage done by ebola is pretty drastic. So even if one were to receive an antibody injection, it may not alter the outcome if the patient is too far gone.
There are a number of factors if the availability is limited and even if it is not. First, the patient may be too far gone to be helped, as stated above if they having been fighting it for a while then they’ll have massive internal damage that could kill them even if all ebola virions were killed instantly.
Second, if there is a shortage of the antibody I hope that they put a massive over-estimated number of viable antibodies into each vial, since you have to kill them all it needs overkill. Underkill without a repeat dose probably prolongs the life but no guarantee. I expect if a patient can get to 10 days with some assistance then it’s possible their own lymphocytes will start producing antibodies to the ebola. Again though it depends how much damage the little bastards have done [bastard used in the correct context since they don’t know their father] already.
@Me
Is there a risk with this new type of antibody therapy that it could in itself cause a dangerous inflammatory reaction [analogous to a cytokine storm] in an already sick person?
Short answer. I don’t know. It was certainly a problem with early attempts. There is always a possibility that when you introduce anything into a human system, you can get either an antigen/antibody reaction or a pyrogenic response or an anaphylactic response. The former would occur with something which is known to the system as alien, i.e. wrong blood group. The pyrogenic response is for instance when you have tiny particulates in something you inject, they cause a massive fever response, the anaphylactic response is more to do with foreign proteins causing release of histamine and cytokines from things like mast cells and other granulocytes but we’re getting technical now.
To get to the point where they have something to inject, these responses will all have been tested in rodents and probably primates too. They’ve now been tested in humans.
The grail for researchers has always been a fully human monoclonal antibody and I think they aren’t far off. Last I heard the ones on the market are from transgenic mice, a bit of both as it were.
I just really hope they’ve made a breakthrough.
I try not to be either paranoid or morbid in my speculations, but it will be very interesting to see how population genetics work themselves out in the co-evolution of ebola-human relationship – especially in how human behavior in treating and managing the sick and curing the disease feeds into the evolutionary loop. For ebola it’s a whole new order to make a living in, ‘Yay!’. For the humans and other primates its ‘Oh, my God!’. Now, the two seem to be more or less stuck with each other.
We’ll see how it goes.
W^3
A BBC radio 4 interviewee today was suggesting ebola was too successful i.e. people died so quickly it didn’t have time to transmit itself to many third parties.
By that logic if it ‘slowed down’ things could get worse.
OB. Exactly. It slows down [no it doesn’t it changes] by adapting to its new host.Bat to human takes a wee while to sort out by mutation but not as far as bird to human [as in avian flu].
As I said before it’s all maths. 1 million divisions for 1 mutation, 1 million mutations for 1 usable adaptation. By usable, I mean helps the organism survive/replicate.
It’s cold mathematics and opportunity.
Things get worse, health system collapsing leading to preventable deaths going untreated.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/08/07/uk-health-ebola-liberia-idUKKBN0G72FT20140807?
The young American doctor is now up to communicationg about his situation:
http://www.samaritanspurse.org/article/dr-kent-brantly-statement/?utm_source=SPFacebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=m_Y000-SOCM_SocialMedia