Me, Now That Ebola Has Come To USA

[lsiberian]

Once there is a vaccine, there will be no repeat customers.

Yeah but he can sell the vaccine to everyone. Who wants to risk Ebola?

 

[rnatalli]

I could be wrong, but I don't believe we have ever seen a virus go from not being airborne to being airborne ever. Odds of winning the lottery are much better.

 

[TLS Guy]

Yeah but he can sell the vaccine to everyone. Who wants to risk Ebola?

The vaccine being tested at Oxford university, has antigenic aspects of Ebola spliced to a harmless virus as the carrier. They have injected it into British volunteers and seeing if they get an antibody response.

 

[lsiberian]

The vaccine being tested at Oxford university, has antigenic aspects of Ebola spliced to a harmless virus as the carrier. They have injected it into British volunteers and seeing if they get an antibody response.

They are brave volunteers. My wife's cousin got deployed to help fight this thing and if there is one thing our military should do well it's handling this crisis. It's really sad hearing about the Ebola orphans being left behind too.

 

[Swerd]

I could be wrong, but I don't believe we have ever seen a virus go from not being airborne to being airborne ever. Odds of winning the lottery are much better.

I don't know enough about viruses to comment intelligently on this.

But I do know that viruses have a much much higher mutation rate than their animal hosts, such as us. So the mathematical odds of never switching to airborne transmission may not be as high as you hope.

 

[herbu]

Ebola is not new. I seem to remember hearing about it for years. For something that causes the concern and resources now launched after one guy comes to the US with it, why are we still in the experimental phase for treatment, vaccine or a cure? With periodic outbreaks in Africa for years, was it really a stretch to imagine one day it would come here, or London, or Hong Kong, etc?

 

[markw]

Ebola is not new. I seem to remember hearing about it for years. For something that causes the concern and resources now launched after one guy comes to the US with it, why are we still in the experimental phase for treatment, vaccine or a cure? With periodic outbreaks in Africa for years, was it really a stretch to imagine one day it would come here, or London, or Hong Kong, etc?

No guarantee, but my $$ is that there wasn't enough profit in developing one. Now, well...

 

[Rickster71]

No guarantee, but my $$ is that there wasn't enough profit in developing one. Now, well...

Exactly.
Government tends to ride in on a white horse to rescue us from a problem they created in the first place.

 

[Swerd]

Ebola is not new. I seem to remember hearing about it for years. For something that causes the concern and resources now launched after one guy comes to the US with it, why are we still in the experimental phase for treatment, vaccine or a cure? With periodic outbreaks in Africa for years, was it really a stretch to imagine one day it would come here, or London, or Hong Kong, etc?

No guarantee, but my $$ is that there wasn't enough profit in developing one. Now, well...

Exactly.
Government tends to ride in on a white horse to rescue us from a problem they created in the first place.

The wise guys at work have been saying since early in the summer that, "we're about 50 dead white people away from a treatment for Ebola".

Big pharma has shied away from vaccine development for mainly the reason mark says, not enough profit. At the same time, the government (the NIH, the CDCP, and the Army) has been pushing hard for an Ebola vaccine.

But the other reason why big pharma has run from vaccines is there are too many lawsuits from foolish anti-vaccine crazies and political interference standing in the way of proper vaccine development. Think of the unwarranted opposition to the Human Papiloma Virus (HPV) vaccine. It stands to eliminate as much as 80% of cervical cancer, and may have unexpected effects on the rates of esophageal and possibly prostate cancer.

Also, think back to the polio scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and how readily the public fully backed the rapid widespread testing of the Salk vaccine and later the better Sabin vaccine. I was one of many kids around the country that got them. By today's standards it couldn't happen, it was a very large, unregulated clinical trial of healthy children. But few if anyone back then didn't want their kids to be immunized against polio, even if it was an experimental vaccine.

 

[markw]

Hmmmm.. why does this all seem to fall back to lawyers making money off of lawsuits? Aren't most of our people in Washington Lawyers, too?

 

[Swerd]

Don't paint with such a broad brush.

Many government officials (technical, scientific, and medical professionals) are not lawyers. And they have been hollering at the various elected officials (manly lawyers, but primarily politicians) who have underfunded or blocked their efforts.

 

[Rickster71]

Hmmmm.. why does this all seem to fall back to lawyers making money off of lawsuits? Aren't most of our people in Washington Lawyers, too?

That's one way.
Just give them a little more time to prop up one or two pharma companies and buy up the stock.
Congress Quietly Repeals Congressional Insider Trading Ban - NYU Local

 

[markw]

There's more of that change you can believe in.

Passed unanimously in both houed without a debate Whole thing took maybe 15 seconds.

 

[lsiberian]

There's more of that change you can believe in.

Passed unanimously in both houed without a debate Whole thing took maybe 15 seconds.

I guess Republicans and Democrats found something they can agree on finally.

 

[herbu]

But the other reason why big pharma has run from vaccines is there are too many lawsuits from foolish anti-vaccine crazies and political interference standing in the way of proper vaccine development.

This I can believe. It's all about the money. Always. Drug development is a gamble... cost vs potential reward. With the potential reward of an Ebola vaccine or treatment, there must be something else either inflating the cost or mitigating the reward.

 

[Chu Gai]

Read that that guy, Duncan, is dead.

 

[j_garcia]

This I can believe. It's all about the money. Always. Drug development is a gamble... cost vs potential reward. With the potential reward of an Ebola vaccine or treatment, there must be something else either inflating the cost or mitigating the reward.

A friend of ours is a virologist and she was saying ebola isn't so easy to create a vaccine for. Don't recall what the reason was exactly, but it isn't money. Pharma, money and politics may affect it, but there are most certainly people working on a treatment that actually do just want to create a treatment because it is in the best interest of people.

 

[Swerd]

The vaccine being tested at Oxford university, has antigenic aspects of Ebola spliced to a harmless virus as the carrier. They have injected it into British volunteers and seeing if they get an antibody response.

A friend of ours is a virologist and she was saying ebola isn't so easy to create a vaccine for. Don't recall what the reason was exactly, but it isn't money. Pharma, money and politics may affect it, but there are most certainly people working on a treatment that actually do just want to create a treatment because it is in the best interest of people.

Making an effective vaccine is a strange business – half science – half magic – and half luck. For some viruses, notably smallpox and polio, it was very easy to develop a form of the virus that did not cause the disease (non pathogenic) but was similar enough to the pathogenic form of the virus that, when injected, it could stimulate an immune response that could actually prevent the disease from developing after an infection began. With polio, effective vaccines were quickly developed once scientists figured out a way to grow enough of the virus in the lab. I'm only over simplifying a bit, but the first ways they inactivated polio virus with heat worked at generating a neutralizing immune response. We were lucky. Similar things happened with measles, mumps, chicken pox, diphtheria, typhoid.

We haven't been so lucky with other viruses and a few micro organism-based diseases like tuberculosis and malaria. People have tried hard, but haven't succeeded in getting a neutralizing immune response. Probably the best known example is the HIV virus.

The technique that TLS Guy mentioned in the above quote, seems like a great idea, but it was first developed to get an effective HIV vaccine, and so far hasn't worked for that virus. We'll see whether we get lucky or not with Ebola.

 

[Alex2507]

I heard weed cures ebola.

 

[Swerd]

I heard weed cures ebola.

You should volunteer for a trial of that . I wonder what could be used for the placebo control? Oregano?