Posted on 10/03/2014 4:33:05 AM PDT by blam
Philip Sherwell
October 3, 2014
The US government is scrambling to start production of the experimental Ebola drug that is viewed as the most promising medical treatment in the fight against the virus.
The ZMapp serum was used to treat two American missionaries who recovered from Ebola, but is not available for the Dallas man currently fighting the disease as the limited supplies made for clinical trials ran out in August.
Federal officials and two of the world’s largest charities are in advanced talks with pharmaceutical companies to launch accelerated production from genetically-engineered tobacco plants and animal cells.
But even as officials struggle to play catch-up with the epidemic, it has also emerged that ZMapp's development was held up for years by funding delays from a Pentagon programme aimed at countering biological threats.
And scientists acknowledge that despite the new efforts, they may not be able to produce more than a few hundred treatment courses by early next spring. That will be far behind the international demand and will confront officials with life-and-death challenges of rationing and priorities.
“The biology just doesn’t allow you to do it tomorrow,” Alan Magill, a programme director at the Gates Foundation which is helping to organise ZMapp development, told The New York Times .
Three vaccines and up to 10 medications are in various stages of development, according to health officials, with ZMapp the most promising so far.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I was working as a nurse when AIDS first was coming into the spotlight.
Remember the activists who said there wouldn’t be a cure for AIDS until everyone was exposed to it?
This reminds me of that. Until now, Ebola has been a disease that only people in limited areas of Africa could get. Now it’s here in America and part of me says it’s on purpose, because once we dirty racists in THIS country are scared of it, the cure will be found. Or so the anti-racism crowd thinks.
Little do they know, while the protesters are swarming New York leaving trash all over to be cleaned up, and pooping on police car doors, all the conservative-pro-life-Christian racists are donating money and working and going to Africa themselves to take care of people with Ebola, and funding the organizations that have found a cure.
I guess now some of those same people will have to break laws to grow the tobacco needed to make more of this drug, since I’m sure that somehow growing tobacco is regulated by the federal government - right?
Like my White racist friends who went to help in New Orleans after Katrina.
A question about this treatment is “How much can Fujifilm ramp up production and how soon?”
The nurse mentioned in the earlier post HAS BEEN CURED and SENT HOME from the hospital according to MSN UK news. She was admitted to the hospital Sept. 19
Do you have a link to that? We were discussing the anti-rna drugs on another thread yesterday. I would love love love to have a link to that.
Japan has stockpiled enough of that drug (the fuji compound) to treat 20K patients.
They offered that stockpile to WHO over a month ago.
Since then, crickets...
The fuji compound and the anti-hiv compound that Liberian doctor used are close analogs of one another structurally.
C 19 and 24.
Looks like there HAS been a human trial with the Fuji compound.
That is the private sector...
They have to literally grow the plant for the drug..
It’s not a quicky process..
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