Posted on 09/06/2014 2:13:53 PM PDT by BenLurkin
... part of the population in West Africa is immune to the Ebola virus, according to virologists who specialize in the disease.
Assuming they are correct, and if those people can be identified... Immune persons could safely tend the sick and bury the dead just as smallpox survivors did in the centuries before smallpox vaccine.
...antibodies could be harvested from their blood to treat new Ebola victims.
But many factors remain unclear, including which Africans have antibodies and how much antibody is needed to be protective....
“It's fair to say that some people are immune,” said Robert F. Garry Jr., a Tulane University expert in hemorrhagic fevers who works in Sierra Leone. “But we don't know if it's 1 percent or 2 percent or 20 percent.”
Right now, there are about 1,800 survivors of the current West African outbreak, all of whom are now immune, of course. But there may be many thousands more.
Small studies of household contacts of Ebola victims show that some people are infected without ever falling ill — perhaps because of some unknown genetic advantage.
But many Africans who have never seen a victim also have antibodies.
It is possible that some get low doses of virus by eating infected monkeys or bats that are undercooked.
“If someone got just two or three or four virus particles, if it enters through the mucus membranes in the mouth, yes, it's plausible,” said Thomas W. Geisbert, a hemorrhagic fever expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "... The immune system gets a chance to fight it off.”
...
One of France's leading Ebola experts says he believes that many rural villagers are “vaccinated” by eating fruit gnawed on by bats and contaminated with their saliva.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegram.com ...
Of course. That's exactly why I became immune to the common cold virus when I was one year old. I've led a blissful, cold-free life since then thanks to my conferred immunity at that tender young age.
Disclaimer: I'm not a virologist, but I DID stay at home last night.
I may be the only persona that cooks his chicken legs for 90 minutes over a low flame while basting them with a flavorful sauce.
What I Like is to cook out all of everything that isn’t pure meat, and people swear that they like it, even though everyone else always talks about “moist” chicken, as repulsed as I am by the idea of eating a bat, I am a little curious about what it is like.
Having had to deal with the nighttime bats in Houston when tossing up pebbles over your friends to see the bats follow them down, and chasing DDT trucks was the highlight of our summer nights, it never occurred to me that bats could be eaten, or that they even had any meat on their bones, to eat.
AlGore says we should send the waste "two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …"
Next to Obama, he's the world's smartest person on everything.
PS. That's a true quote, viz, November 12, 2009 NBC "Tonight Show."
I would like to see the quote, do you have a link?
No natural law. More like the law of probability.
When you think about it, the percentage of Africans who are immune to ebola might be quite high, in the 20-40 per cent range.
Can we say with 100% certainty that for all viruses some portion of humans are immune. Nope. What the probability is we don't know. That's my only point, we don't know for sure.
I would proceed as if no one was immune, until I knew for certain who was or was not. Just to have an abundance of caution.
Some people do survive, that we know. What I haven't seen is whether that has been due to some “natural immunity” or whether those people just have super immune system responses to viruses.
Are you aware of any scientific studies investigating the issue, or are you just asserting that There are so many humans around that “a certain percentage of us, somewhere, must have immunity to any particular virus”?
If so, I would love to have a link or list so that I could read up on it. I would be very useful knowledge and a very interesting thing to read about I think.
Q - "Is it safe for Ebola patients to use the bathroom?"
A - "Yes. Sanitary sewers may be used for the safe disposal of patient waste. Additionally, sewage handling processes (e.g., anaerobic digestion, composting, disinfection) in the United States are designed to inactivate infectious agents."
CDC - Interim Guidance for Environmental Infection Control in Hospitals for Ebola Virus
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
By "1800 survivors", is the writer including all those infected who are not dead? Some of those cases have yet to be resolved.
There are so many ways to play with the numbers, I think we have to be careful.
Certainly, some are immune--just like the Bubonic Plague had pockets of survivors who had apparent immunity or high resistance. The questions arise of how many, and how to identify them.
The Spanish flu had people that were immune also. It happens.
.
You should have watched the whole show. Of course they don’t release it into the sewage system without sterilization.
It was a mesmerizing hour, left me with admiration for both the highly professional medical staff and for Dr. Brantly and Mrs. Writebol. Info and experience gathered from this experience should have long-term benefits.
Thanks. I did watch most of it. I’m scarred from having read The Ghost Map where hundreds of people died of cholera from drinking from a tainted well that was polluted from a near by cess pool.
There are literally thousands of varieties of the common cold virus. You are probably immune to each one you have had in recent years, but that leaves a lot of infection still out there.
There are several strains of ebola, it would be interesting to know if having one strain confers immunity to the others as well. If so that would leave hope for an attenuated vaccine (like the smallpox vaccine) for ebola....
There are hundreds of different viruses that cause the common cold. If you never develop symptomatic common cold illness, I would say that there is something about your immune system that prevents you from having symptoms.
I rarely get colds. I think I might have had one a couple years ago. Then again, it might have been allergies.
The survivors are those who have tested negative for the virus. I forget the exact protocol, but I believe that their blood must test negative for virus for 4 days, then they are released from the hospital.
You said: "Some people do survive, that we know. What I haven't seen is whether that has been due to some “natural immunity” or whether those people just have super immune system responses to viruses."
So, I guess we have to define "immunity". If you define immunity as "..people do survive" then the immunity rate is as high as 50% and as low as 10% for some strains. That we know too.
One of the few hopeful articles to come out on Ebola recently.
Thanks for the ping!
That’s just for this particular strain. And that is not the question I asked.
The issue was for any given virus, is it accurate to state that a certain amount of people will always have a natural immunity to it. And given that seems to be your assertion, I asked if there was any scientific studies that had been done to support that thesis.
Given your reply, I take it that you know of none. That’s too bad, it would have been worth reading about. Thanks any way.
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