Posted on 09/13/2014 9:08:35 PM PDT by Thud
… The scale of the present outbreak, together with the fear and suffering it is causing, has resulted in a burst of scientific activity to find new treatments and vaccines. Some of these medicines look promising. But to contain the spread of Ebola, scientists and health officials will have to bypass many of the existing rules that govern the delivery of new drugs, and develop potential remedies with unprecedented speed.
This strategy is being endorsed widely. In August experts from the WHO concluded that, provided certain conditions are met, it would be ethical to offer unproven, experimental treatments or methods to prevent infection. Ebola experts gathered by the WHO in Geneva on September 4th-5th repeated this, and said the delivery of new medicines was now essential.
… Phase 1 trials are used to test whether a drug is safe in healthy individuals, after which a series of further trials establish whether it works. But in this case, vaccines are expected to be offered directly to health-care workers in infected areas once the initial tests are complete. The effects of the vaccine would then be monitored in the field.
… The results of the safety trials will start to arrive in November, and vaccines may be provided immediately to health-care workers who agree to be injected—some vaccine production is already under way. Experts hope they will be safe, as the viral “platforms” on which they are based have already been tested in humans. But these vaccines will not be available to restrain the epidemic over the next few months—a time that many think will be critical in containing the disease.
The experts at the WHO’s Geneva meeting were most optimistic about two related methods of treatment: whole blood transfusion and purified blood plasma, known as convalescent serum...
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
ping
I trust the WHO as far as I can throw the UN headquarters building.
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
Thanks, Thud!
Thanks for the ping!
You’re Welcome, Alamo-Girl!
The cultural aspects of this have to be handled carefully.
ping
This is a little misleading. The efforts to find new vaccines and treatments did not start because of this outbreak. They were already underway, and are getting attention now because of the news.
There are some real problems with developing treatments or vaccines for Ebola. Phase 1 trials are safety trials, phase 2 are dose-finding trials, and phase 3 are efficacy trials. Advancing a drug past phase 1 is going to be extremely difficult for Ebola, since few people would be willing to be experimentally infected.
Bring Out Your Dead
Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
They should be flooding the African hot zones with Favipiravir - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favipiravir . We’d be able to tell if it was helping or not within a week or two.
Mouse trials of it against Ebola have been extremely effective, and Japan has tons of it stockpiled. However, the governments and WHO have been dragging their feet on this so long, I’ve been considering getting some amateur chemists to wiki some instructions for synthesizing Favipiravir from Pyrazinamide, a very similar chemical which is commonly available for treating TB.
In the USA, it may be possible to get this experimental drug from http://www.favorflustudy.com/ - but don’t tell them you want it for Ebola.
Die from Ebola right now, in a horrible manner;
Or get cancer in ten years,
Pretty easy decision as far as I am concerned.
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