Posted on 08/08/2014 10:01:35 AM PDT by FR_addict
President Obama held a news conference on Wednesday evening to tout the success three day U.S. African Leaders Summit, but what reporters really wanted to know about was Ebola.
Obama said it was premature for him to say whether the U.S. would send an unapproved, experimental drug to Africa or whether he would support fast-tracking its approval in the U.S.
"I think we've got to let the science guide us," the president said, adding that he didn't have enough data about the effectiveness of the medicine. ..."
(Excerpt) Read more at thewire.com ...
Some studies seem to indicate that it’s early versions have been plaguing humans for ten thousand years.
It’s very slow to make any major changes in it’s structure. It has attributes that prevent it from easily recombining with other diseases.
It will be around for a long time to come. But yes, we are or have been since 2010, getting closer to making a compound that can kill it.
So you didn’t mean the TKM-Ebola program?
No.
Did you actually bother to READ the Japantimes link?
The whole thing.
Not just the first paragraph.
Totally agreed.
I read via the Fumento link the other day a study that looked at percentages of African populations that had antibodies to some or other ebola strain. I have to wonder, given the proximity to it and the length of time it’s bedeviled that region’s population how many SNPs are in those populations that would confer if not immunity, some sort of greater viral load necessary to cause fatal infection. Sort of like the d32 SNP in CCR5 that does the same with HIV.
The issue really boiled down to the brass, as they say, is human testing.
Any drug of any kind has to go through a human test or tests before it is approved for market.
The difficulty is obvious.
Who in their right mind would volunteer to be infected with ebola, and what would the Placebo group think?
So this outbreak is a ethical nightmare of sorts for the regulators...
Do they take advantage of desperate foreign people of color to test the drugs?
Or do they as quietly as possible, allow the drug to be used on a limited number of countrymen who just happen to be infected..... and do it in the homeland.
The Fuji drug has already been tested on humans. Japan is stockpiling it right now in the even of a ‘wacky’ flu virus mutation.
It just hasn’t been tested on humans for ebola.
If you had ebola, with an 80% chance of mortality, what would be your worst concern? That it might not work on ebola in humans.
“The advantage of using Favipiravir in an Ebola outbreak is that it has already been extensively tested for use as an antiviral in human trials for influenza. The drug is now in a U.S. final-stage trial for treating influenza.”
From the Japantimes link.
That is probably the only really scary thing about Ebola in my view.
When it presents in the last stage where it is able to spread through fluids, the viral load, as you phrased it is multiples higher than any other known communicable virus.
So it quickly overruns the human immune system before it can react. Which leads to a high death rate.
Well then, America is off the hook, we need to get this news to the media.
Good luck.
America is too busy with medical ethics regarding a serum of limited availability.
And Fuji probably hasn’t coughed up enough $$$ to the right person.
Yeah, it’s really a flu drug.
I am not a virologist, and I only stayed in a Holiday in Express one time and long ago. But unless I knew how this anti-viral worked exactly with the Flu, I would be somewhat reticent to use it on Ebola until I did.
But I’ll leave that to the experts. However I do know that Ebola Zaire was the origin of Ebola Reston. How that occurred is unknown, but the Reston virus picked up the ability to attack the respiratory system in a similar way as the Flu. Although it seemingly cannot merge with the Flu. It merged with something.
But end result was that the Reston virus was harmless to humans...so it neutered some of it’s abilities.
I would just be careful messing about with antivirals until they run all the potential models.
Read this link:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=favipiravir
It’s shown wide spectrum activity against RNA viruses.
If I had a choice between a drug that might NOT work against my particular viral infection and just ‘dealing’ with an 80% mortality rate for doing nothing, I’d probably take the antiflu drug and hope for the best.
But every day we dither, more humans become infected. And the virus has a greater chance to figure us out and get lucky with a mutation that becomes much more dangerous.
did you catch post 27? canadian company had ‘safety issues’ in prelim. trials? wonder what those issues were/are?
No clue.
But the Tekmira treatment is NOT the same one as the Fuji one that’s currently being stockpiled in Japan.
I would not worry much about mutations.
In the 40 years we have been dealing with it, it has shown no propensity to mutate in the African populations. However we do know it has in the past because there are differing strains, most of which are only found in animals.
Sounds to me like the serum is not 100 % effective. Last I read out of Atlanta was that we needed to pray for the two treated victims to fully recover. This is also a new strain of Ebola about 97 % similar to Ebola Zaire.
http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20140808213981
JEDDAH — The first Saudi who was suspected to have contracted the Ebola virus was buried at Briman graveyard in north Jeddah that is dedicated for the burial of victims of infectious diseases. The authorities prevented his family from washing him, attend his burial or be present at his burial ceremony. The Saudi health authorities announced his death on Wednesday. They said another Saudi citizen who was in direct contact with him showed symptoms of the deadly virus and was quarantined at King Fahd Hospital in Jeddah. Ibrahim Al-Zahrani is said to have gotten the infection from Sierra Leone, where he was on a business visit.
http://www.voanews.com/content/nigerians-hope-to-complete-hajj-amid-ebola-outbreak/2407271.html
thanks anyway, BA, I’ll try digging around and see what I can find. Probably fixed by now anyway.
That Fuji anti-viral sounds pretty interesting too.
So The Emperor is controlling the global distribution of medicines?
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