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<p>Muslim burial practices are being blamed for the spread of Ebola.</p> <p>Remains of Secretary General of The Nigeria Supreme General for Islamic Affairs and Seriki of Egbaland, Alhaji Lateeef Adegbite at his burial in 2012.</p> <p>Islam requires family members to personally wash the corpses of loved ones from head to toe. This practise is putting more Africans at risk to catch the disease that is spread by body fluids.</p>

The pitch was intriguing: U.S. health officials wanted to fast-track trials for an Ebola vaccine and sounded the call for volunteers. Charles Sullivan called up the hotline on a whim, figuring the National Institutes of Health already had filled its queue and wouldn’t need him. But he was accepted for three rounds of shots of a deactivated virus, a year’s worth of blood analysis and a $900 check for his trouble. The clinical trial went well, and the vaccine seemed promising. A decade later, the country is still waiting for a vaccine amid a worldwide Ebola outbreak, and Mr. Sullivan...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent more than $39 million on obese lesbians, origami condoms, texting drunks, and dozens of other projects that could have been scrapped in favor of developing an Ebola vaccine. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready,” said NIH Director Francis Collins, blaming budget cuts for his agency’s failure to develop a vaccine for the deadly virus. However, the Washington Free Beacon has uncovered $39,643,352 worth...

Israeli drug companies, such as Teva, are pretty good at producing imitation drugs quickly. Teva was truly disruptive to big pharma companies, since they often feared blockbuster drugs going off patent as Teva was ready and waiting with a quality generic imitation. It’s not so surprising that what is bad for big pharma is good for the patient and the consumer, and now an Israeli biotech company named Protalix is ready to replenish supplies of the experimental Ebola vaccine, ZMapp. The disease has already claimed the lives of 3,944, predominantly in Africa, but in the U.S., there has been one...

A Chinese pharmaceutical firm that has links with the country's military has developed an experimental Ebola drug. It is hoping federal authorities will immediately grant its approval so it can be marketed the soonest. Sihuan Pharmaceutical Holdings Group Ltd developed the drug called JK-05, along with the Institute of Microbiological Epidemiology, a part of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences. It has been approved but only for emergency military purposes. Sihuan also admitted during an investor call last week it has yet to undergo clinical trials. The firm said it is working to have the tests started, but if possible...

The Ebola vaccine that Canada has developed has started its human clinical trials, Health Minister Rona Ambrose announced. Authorities will test the VSV-EBOV vaccine on a small group of people to assess its safety, determine the appropriate dosage and identify any side effects. So far, the vaccine has shown a 100 per cent success rate in animals, Ambrose said. A total of 20 vials of the experimental vaccine have been supplied for use in the trial. It was developed by scientists at the Public Health Agency of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The 20 healthy volunteers at the Walter Reed...

Officials began testing a Canadian-made Ebola vaccine on human volunteers in the United States Monday. The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research enlisted 39 healthy volunteers for the trial, and injected the first subject with the VSV-EBOV vaccine in phase 1 of testing Monday. Canada supplied 20 vials of the vaccine for the trial, which medical officials will be monitoring predominately throughout the phase 1 trial for safety, and also to determine proper dosage level. Officials divided the volunteers into three groups, the first of which received a low-dose of the vaccination and will need medical clearance from a safety...

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The first volunteer in a fast-tracked British safety trial of an experimental Ebola vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline received the injection on Wednesday, trial organisers said. The candidate Ebola vaccine, which GSK co-developed with the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has also been given to 10 volunteers taking part in a similar separate trial in the United States, and so far there were no signs of any serious adverse reactions, doctors said. The vaccine being tested in the UK is designed to specifically target the Zaire strain of Ebola, the one circulating in the West Africa epidemic, the worst Ebola outbreak...

ob Schneider has learned the hard way that there's no way to inoculate yourself against an Internet backlash. State Farm Insurance has dropped an ad campaign featuring the "Deuce Bigalow" star in a reprisal of his "Richmeister" character -- a.k.a. the "making copies" guy -- from "Saturday Night Live." The decision stems not from an objection to rehashed humor from the mid-'90s, but to Schneider's outspoken stance against childhood vaccines. Along with former "View" co-host Jenny McCarthy, Schneider, who has lately been busy trying to revive his career with a spec sitcom, has been one of the most vocal celebrity...

September 26, 2014AFPGeneva (AFP) - Thousands of experimental Ebola vaccine doses from British GSK and US NewLink should be ready for use by early 2015 in countries affected by the epidemic, the World Health Organization said Friday. "If everything goes well, we may be able to begin using some of these vaccines in some of the affected countries at the very beginning of next year," said WHO assistant director general Marie-Paule Kieny. There is no licensed treatment or vaccine against the virus that has killed nearly 3,000 people in West Africa, and the UN health agency has endorsed rushing through...

As proof of their bravery, rebels fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are suspected of sabotaging a batch of measles vaccinations, leading to the deaths of up to 50 young children. If true, it's a new low in an especially discouraging chapter of modern history.LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Dozens of infants in the rebel-held cities of Jarjanaz and Sinjar in Idlib province fell ill and died after being given the drugs. The causes of death has not yet been established. Officials reportedly suspect the vaccines may have been tampered with while left unguarded in a storage facility in...

At least 34 children have died in rebel-held Syria after being injected with contaminated measles vaccines, the rebel government said on Tuesday, warning that the deaths might be caused by saboteurs linked to the Assad regime. The death toll is expected to rise, with many children from eight towns in Idlib province, north-west Syria, still in intensive care on Tuesday night. ...

… 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...

A World Health Organization official says an Ebola vaccine developed in Canada may be the first to be approved for use, possibly before the year is out. Marie-Paule Kieny says data from the first safety studies in humans of two experimental vaccines should be available by November. She says if they are deemed safe to use, it could open the door initially for use in health-care workers tending the sick. One of the experimental vaccines was developed at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. The company which licensed that vaccine, NewLink Genetics, announced this week that it had received approval...

Britons are to be the first in the world to test a new vaccine against the deadly ebola virus. Altogether 60 healthy volunteers will be given the vaccine next month in a trial led by Oxford University scientists. If the vaccine performs as well in humans as in monkeys, the trial will be extended to 80 people in The Gambia and in Mali. The entire trial programme is being fast-tracked – subject to ethical approval – with the intention of using the vaccine in people at high risk in West Africa early next year. Latest figures show that more than...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE-AUGUST 27,2014 STATEMENT OF WILLIAM W. THOMPSON, Ph.D., REGARDING THE 2004 ARTICLE EXAMINING THE POSSIBILITY OF A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MMR VACCINE AND AUTISM My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998. I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report...

Dr. Leslie Lobel is an Israeli virologist conducting cutting edge research on a cure for Ebola -- a cure he believes is three to five years away. As reported in the Times of Israel: Unlike many people, Dr. Leslie Lobel has not been shocked to hear about the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the largest ever recorded since the virus’s discovery in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire). A Ben-Gurion University of the Negev virologist and a leader in the search for a cure for the devastating disease, Lobel had been predicting such an outbreak. (snip)...

New York - It's an eye-catching angle in the story of an experimental treatment for Ebola: The drug comes from tobacco plants that were turned into living pharmaceutical factories. Using plants this way, sometimes called "pharming" can produce complex and valuable proteins for medicines. That approach, studied for about 20 years, hasn't caught on widely in the pharmaceutical industry. But some companies and academic labs are pursuing it to create medicines and vaccines against such targets as HIV, cancer, the deadly Marburg virus and norovirus, known for causing outbreaks of stomach bug on cruise ships, as well as Ebola. While...