Off topic a little [and maybe your knowledge can help], there’s one thing that really troubles me about Obama: why doesn’t he expdedite Zmapp? This is tobacco harvest season. Why will it take until spring?
The US Is Scrambling To Produce The Experimental Ebola Drug ZMapp [UK/Telegraph]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3210701/posts
“...they may not be able to produce more than a few hundred treatment courses by early next spring...”
The tobacco used to produce the ZMapp is not the same as that grown commercially; it must be grown under controlled conditions, and "infected" with the blueprint to make the antibodies. Since the antibodies are not naturally plant proteins, it takes a while for the plant to make them and the plant does not make a lot. It takes a large number of plants to produce a small amount of antibody. After the plants make the protein, it must be extracted and purified, which can take several days or longer. The company that made the ZMapp is not scaled to large production runs, but only to small experimental size lots. One journalist deduced that "it can take a couple of months for the facility to come up to full speed, after which it can produce 20 to 40 treatment courses a month." (This is a single sentence quoted from NYT; I hope this quote is allowable to post here.) Even at the upper end, 40 treatment courses per month falls way short of what is needed. Furthermore, we still do not know if the ZMapp had effect in those highly publicized cases where it was used.
Despite Obama's election campaign claims to have the godlike power to lower the oceans and change the earth's temperature, he really does not have the power to overcome physical reality to make ZMapp production fast.