Bring in the pros!
Posted on 10/03/2014 1:43:14 PM PDT by RinaseaofDs
Dr. Gorbee Logan has given the drug, lamivudine, to 15 Ebola patients, and all but two survived. That's about a 13% mortality rate.
Logan said he got the idea to try lamivudine when he read in scientific journals that HIV and Ebola replicate inside the body in much the same way.
"Ebola is a brainchild of HIV," he said. "It's a destructive strain of HIV."
At first he tried a drug called acyclovir, which is often given to HIV patients to treat infections that occur with their weakened immune systems. But it didn't seem to be effective. Then he tried lamivudine on a health care worker who'd become ill, and within a day or two he showed signs of improvement and survived.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases says that theoretically, Logan's approach has some merit. Lamivudine is a nucleocide analog, and other drugs in this class are being studied to treat Ebola.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Don’t touch my monkey.
shared with drudge. I wonder if I could contact Liberia.
Who says it would (or might be) just a few people?
Given the nature of humans, and this disease's ability to spread so rapidly throughout a population, it could be thousands -- even hundreds of thousands infected. In a large country (or cluster of countries), it could be millions. Especially if Ebola mutates, and develops the ability to go airborne.
Drug makers would be wise to at least quickly study what it would take for them to get this drug into rapid production.
Bring in the pros!
I wasn’t speaking of any particular disease, I was speaking to the universe of all disease, and then gave one hypothetical example to try to simplify what I was saying.
To repeat-the market will determine what a manufacturer will do. There is a certain volume that will give them a break even point. There is a certain volume that will give them the profit margin they want. They will produce what is profitable.
With this particular drug, solutions are being tested and worked on. It appears that powerful interests are pushing forward with ZMapp, and trying to get it into the market place sooner rather than later.
If you were a company that had already invested tons of money in ZMapp and your company had that patent, and could make tons of money on it, that’s a powerful reason to prefer ZMapp.
If a generic drug already exists that may be more effective, or just as effective, then your investment in ZMapp is in danger of becoming water down the drain, depending on the price differential.
Now if you test the generic and find out for sure it’s a better treatment, ethically the generic drug should be produced, but your profit on it may not be enough to cover what you have already spent on ZMapp, and you have just made your company very liable, if you ignore research in favor of the generic.
Some other company that doesn’t have a vested interest in ZMapp, may very well pick up on this generic drug and do something with it, since the volume is anticipated to pick up.
Then, there’s going to lobbyists and politicians receiving money from both companies in an effort to get the most favorable treatment for their respective products.
At any rate, as I agreed with you before, the market will determine what the company does and what drugs are produced, but may be mitigated by whatever political and regulatory agencies do that may have an impact.
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
*click* spin *click* spin *click* spin…BANG!
Eeeee-bolllll-aaaaaa ping!
Bring Out Your Dead
We’re gonna need 
a bigger cart!
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...
Good news!
PING!
BTTT
Bravo Dr. Logan! Bravo!
May I touch your widow’s peak?
Thanks for the ping!
Alright, but I think you're drilling down into needless complexity with the balance of your reply. I don't have any fundamental disagreements with you on that, except that it seems only tangentially tethered to this conversation.
At any rate, as I agreed with you before, the market will determine what the company does and what drugs are produced...
We agree on that. As I said, if this HIV drug works as advertised on those who are within a five day window of being infected, and infection rates even start to reach epidemic proportions in the developed world, you'll see some manufacturer produce mass quantities of this drug for sale.
That is, as long as government regulatory agencies don't suppress or impede its rapid dissemination to the public.
That last sentence could be a big factor in how this all turns out.
You’re Welcome, Alamo-Girl!
When the effect is large enough it shows up in even small samples.
As for his off the cuff statement: lumping together all ssRNA viruses could be ignorance of virology, justifying your accusation of quackery, or just way of communicating to a popular audience, who wouldn't sit though an explanation of the niceties for viral classification, the basis for his, seemingly justified, confidence that a drug developed for HIV would work against Ebola.
I recall asking on a thread several months ago if the antivirals used against HIV had ever been tested against Ebola. I was told that the two viruses were nothing alike, so there was no point in trying because it would never work.
Once again, FReeper naysayers prove wrong.
He had 2 fatalities out of 15, or 13%. The stated fatality rate overall is 68%. It sounds great. Get that drug out there. But meanwhile, take a close look at whether it is meaningful data. How did he select the patients compared to those that were stated to be 68% dying? What is the experience on the frontlines? Get more numbers and keep trying alternatives, maybe mix the therapies in hope of saving more. We do have a decent system for emergency FDA approval of drugs needed to save lives. Recall how the Clintons used the emergency drug rule to get RU486 on the market. If our health care system isn’t totally ruined by now, this thing can be licked. But please don’t be so quick to fall for hysteria!
(Oh, I rounded wrong and forgot I should have used a two-tailed test, it should have been p < .0000008. But heck, that's still good enough for a discovery in particle physics which has the tightest statistical significance standards of any scientific discipline.)
Okay taking his entire 15 person sample compared with the 68% mortality rate for standard treatments, we get p < .00004 . Not good enough for particle physics, but still clinically significant, small sample size notwithstanding.
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