"Secret Serum" Used To Treat Americans With Ebola 390
mrspoonsi (2955715) writes with news that the two Americans infected with Ebola in Liberia and transported to Atlanta for treatment were given an experimental drug, and their conditions appear to be improving. From the article: While some people do fight off the disease on their own, in the case of the two Americans, an experimental serum may have saved their lives. As Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol waited in a Liberian hospital, someone from the National Institutes of Health reached out to Samaritan's Purse, one of the two North Carolina-based Christian relief groups the two were working with, and offered to have vials of an experimental drug called ZMapp sent to Liberia, according to CNN's unnamed source. Although the Food and Drug Administration does allow experimental drugs to occasionally be distributed in life-threatening circumstances without approval under the expanded access or "compassionate use" conditions. It's not yet clear whether that approval was granted in this case or not. ... Brantly, who had been sick for nine days already ... [received] the first dose ... within an hour, he was able to breathe better and a rash on his body started to fade. The next day he was able to shower without help before boarding the air ambulance that flew him to Atlanta.
When the patients awoke (Score:5, Funny)
Their lives were forever changed. One developed incredible muscles, which he used to fight crime. The other's brain was equally enhanced, but her turned to a life of crime.
Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away (Score:5, Funny)
Experts: Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away
http://www.theonion.com/articl... [theonion.com]
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Oh god. I'm laughing so hard I'm crying. Or am I crying so hard I'm laughing?
heard about vaccine on the radio (Score:3)
Apparently there are a number of vaccines being developed. None of them have reached the human trials phase, but several of them have been given to people under in emergency circumstances. The problem is that it requires an official request from the person's government as well as informed consent from the patient. According to the researcher it's hard to get either of these in the area of the current outbreak.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:4, Insightful)
The same reason the US funds a vast majority of drug research in general (at least as of now): It has the money, universities, companies, the property right protection, and other laws that enable people to spend decades working on something and then eventually getting a payday for it.
And much of the rest of the world piggy-backs on US research money and then demands that they get it at a discount or will just ignore the patents anyway. It is part of the reason drugs are so expensive in the US - the US subsidizes the rest of the world.
It would be great if there were 5 or 6 (or more) areas all working on the problems instead of very few. Europe certainly does some, but even with European contributions, their percentages are still quite small.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:4, Interesting)
The rest of the world does not "get US drugs at a discount." Rather, American consumers are forced to pay a lot more for each branded medication than anyone else in the world. It is illegal for us to even shop around for a better deal.
Bust those American patents, world. We need to get affordable medications out there for all.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
Moreover, the American government refuses to try and negotiate on price or bulk buy bargains. Australia subsidizes the cost of drugs, and negotiates aggressively on price with pharma companies since a drug on the PBS is guaranteed to ship huge quantities.
There is no reason American health programs can not do the same.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:4, Informative)
There is no reason American health programs can not do the same.
Actually there is a law against that."The 2003 Medicare law* prohibits Medicare from negotiating drug prices, setting prices or establishing a uniform list of covered drugs, known as a formulary."
*: full title "Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act"
src: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04... [nytimes.com]
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:4, Informative)
Most medical patents aren't American. America has more medical research than other single nation, but by capita many European countries does more research and holds more patents especially Switzerland and Denmark. As such those countries are also interested in seeing the patents protected, though they haven't allowed themselves to be nearly as abused as the American healthcare system.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:4, Insightful)
Cut the marketing budget and the executive salary/bonus overhead and set up publicly funded drug trials and the final costs would plummet (even counting the public money... profit and patent monopolies are massive inefficiencies in the drug "market").
Then you can afford to get back on your meds. Win-win!
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Anytime something is "publicly funded" the cost shoot up.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, which is why medical treatment in the UK is so much cheaper (yes, even after you take into account taxes), than in the US.
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Not for much longer, after the slimy corporate toady bastard Conservative party wankers we have in power executed laws that absolve the state of their responsibility to provide healthcare and break up our NHS (our public property, bought and paid for by our taxes) for the purchase of their moneyed mates, so they can get some of the crumbs from their table.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:4, Informative)
Anytime something is "publicly funded" the cost shoot up.
Which is why the Canadian health care system costs half of that in the US, and gets the same outcomes with high consumer satisfaction.
http://www.openmedicine.ca/art... [openmedicine.ca]
Open Medicine, Vol 1, No 1 (2007)
Home > Vol 1, No 1 (2007) > Guyatt
Research
A systematic review of studies comparing health outcomes in Canada and the United States
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Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Informative)
As a researcher in the pharma industry: You are an idiot.
Where can I find the tens to hundreds of millions in public money needed to fund clinicals for a single drug that will most likely not get approved? That money doesn't exist, and many promising drugs die because companies run out of money. So companies have to have major profits on the few drugs that succeed- you should think about it as if you were playing the lottery, but each ticket cost you 10+ mil. High risk-high reward.
Also, a lot of cost is added by FDA incompetence. Yes, they are needed. Yes, we need to make sure everything is safe to some reasonable statistical level. Unfortunately, old rules and test requirements are never removed, so a company has to do a barrage of tests on everything, of which 90% are redundant outdated tests that nobody uses anymore.
I don't really understand the hatred for drug companies. Why is it a problem to pay a few hundred bucks for a pill that will literally save your life, but not a problem to pay thousands for your car? We need new drugs to replace failing medicines, and cure untreatable diseases. If we want to solve the problem of these diseases, we need to give a reason for people to form companies in this area, and that isn't going to happen without an expectation to get the money spent back.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't really understand the hatred for drug companies.
Well, since you (sort of) asked... Americans pay an outrageous amount for health care and the largest institutional beneficiaries of that are the drug companies, being the only group with double digit profits (the other beneficiaries are high salaried individuals). Defenders of big pharma's high profits usually try to wave away complaints by saying that it's necessary to fund drug research, never mind that if the money was going to research than it wouldn't qualify as profits, but the largest allotment of drug company money goes to advertising useless drugs to people who don't need them - research averages less than 20% of pharma budgets.
Then there's the lobbying: the Medicare Modernization Act forbade the government from negotiating on the cost of drugs, ensuring that Medicare pays twice as much as other groups for common drugs. This was essentially a $200 billion gift the the pharmaceutical industry passed under the pretense of "avoiding socialism." The United States is the only country in the world which both allows drugs to be patented and does nothing to limit the cost of those drugs. And speaking of patents, we have the drug companies to blame for the death of every attempt to pass patent reform - they need strong and indiscriminate patents for foreign markets since many countries, the poorer ones in particular, need drugs but can't afford the licensing. It's funny, but the reason why we have all the problems with software patents doesn't really have anything to do with software.
Oh, and also there's the whole thing about killing people for profit. Remember Vioxx?
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
As another researcher in the pharma industry: reread your post. Your entire post is only highlighting how poor of a job pharmaceutical companies do at effectively bringing drugs to market, all while adding the inefficiency of a 20% profit margin. The emphasis on profit alone also leads to too great of a focus on evergreening and low risk projects.
I've worked in a university lab that brought two (while I was there) drugs from design, synthesis, and screening through animal testing for the cost of an R01 ($250k) each. I realize that the clinicals are more expensive, but even $10M/drug is pretty small change compared to posted phama expenses. It's the bloat above the $10M per drug that makes them so expensive.
Hatred for drug companies comes from the (at least perceived) extortionate nature of the business. People feel as if their health is held ransom for another person's profit. Hospitals share the same ill feelings. It's especially potent because the people who profit the most from the whole scheme are already obscenely wealthy. Buying a car doesn't have the same "life or death" aspect to it.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also shit like taking colchicine, which has been cheap and generic for years, doing a little extra research (which arguably was useful) and then using that status to bump the price up by 15 times [corante.com].
Those people taking the drug couldn't give a shit about the research - they take the pills, their gout gets better, that's their own personal research right there. What sticks in their craw is that their pills now cost $5 apiece.
That and the systematic hiding of research that is negative or equivocal, the deliberate creation of medicines that are just a couple of atoms different from an existing one, not because they'll be better but because they'll be on patent, etc, etc.
Big pharma does a lot of good, but it's kind of like picking gold coins out of a midden.
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One of the points of classical Capitalist Econ 101 is that, if a particular sector of industry consistently makes more than the average profits of business as a whole, tremendous, inexorable, possibly literally transhuman forces, (sometimes called the invisible hand) will push it back into line with the rest of the economy.
When a sector is making a 20% profit against an average for businesses of only about 3.4%, then classic Capitalism would say the forces trying to steer that sector back into line with the
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Costs in commercial labs are actually much higher than costs in university labs.
There was an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about the test for PKU.
It was first developed by some academic researchers, They made some prototype test kits, but they wanted it to be used as widely as possible, so they signed a distribution contract with a commercial company who presumably could do it more efficiently.
The commercial company had startup problems, so the academic researchers started distributing thei
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As yet another researcher in the pharma industry: bullshit. Big companies go after projects that are lower risk with their own money, but I've seen quite a few experimental drugs for smaller issues or for higher risk projects be funded by startup companies, usually by companies founded by researchers out of universities. The base research was done by a university lab, and the final push and trials is done by a company and funded through a combination of VC money, some NIH grants, and funding from large ph
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually what you see here is very well understood. You are seeing an inelastic market; that is if a drug or procedure will save you life, it does not matter of it costs $5 or $5000, you will find the money to pay for it. The reason why socialized healthcare drives costs down is because the government / the insurance company will bargain on your behalf. Since they are not the one who is going to die, they can not be extorted and can pit different drug makers against each other. Health care is one of the few areas where "the free market" does not work as naively expected.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this ignores the reaction of onlookers, who are given a clear message that they're worth nothing to their society, and as such don't owe it anything either. I wonder if a nation facing such a problem might turn to exaggerated forms of patriotism as a desperate attempt to win loyalty where none is deserved, such as making little kids swear their allegiance every morning?
Free market doesn't really seem to work anywhere anymore, seeing how economy is always in a crisis, unemployment has apparently become permanent fixture of it and even employed people can't afford the lifestyle of their parents without getting into debt.
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Where can I find the tens to hundreds of millions in public money needed to fund clinicals for a single drug that will most likely not get approved?
One hundred million dollars is the price of 4,000 JDAM bombs. For comparison, US military buys about 10,000 every year.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it a problem to pay a few hundred bucks for a pill that will literally save your life
Probably because most of the world can't afford that. In fact millions in the US can't afford that, especially if they need a long course of treatment. It's basically telling them "we have a cure, but you are too poor, sorry". Rightly or wrongly I can see why they find that upsetting.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Informative)
World's most profitable pharma company: Pfizer
2013 Net Sales: $51.6B
2013 Net Income (profit): $22B
Profit as a percent of sales: 42.7%
R&D as a percent of sales: 13.3%
World's most profitable automaker: Toyota
2013 Net Sales: $168B
2013 Net Income (profit): $16.2B
Profit as a percent of sales: 9.6%
R&D as a percent of sales: 4.1%
World's most profitable tech company: Apple
2013 Net Sales: $170B
2013 Net Income (profit): $37B
Profit as a percent of sales: 22%
R&D as a percent of sales: 2.6%
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The hatred of the drug companies or any company(corporation) is just the hard liberal/progressive left rally cry. They hate private business, they hate competition. No one should make money
Stop mischaracterizing socialism and go back to fondling your copy of Atlas Shrugged. Socialism is founded on the principle that people should be able to make money; people should be compensated for good work with decent pay. Did you ever notice an abundance of leftist political parties throughout the western world with names like "Party for the Unemployed" or "The Union of Shirkers"? No, most of them have names like "The Labour Party", or "The Worker's Party", because they are founded by and seek to look a
Re: Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People (Score:4, Informative)
Technically, aspirin is a generic name in the USA, plus Australia, France, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Jamaica, Colombia, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, because (no kidding) Germany lost World War 1. In countres where it is still trademarked, the word should be written with a capital A, as Aspirin, the way you used it. The correct way to write the trademarked Johnson and Johnson wound care product is Band-Aid, with the dash.
But surely, even if some of the ACs above are a bit confused, that's not because someone still spends money on marketing brand names like 'Band-Aids". Surely they don't spend anything much on them, Let's see, for 2012, Johnson and Johnson claimed consumer wound care products resulted in sales of about 1 Billion US dollars, even, out of about 67 billion totak. Total advertising was 2.3 billion, so if we assume consumer wound care doesn't get a disproportionate share, that's 'only' approximately 34 million dollars a year. I don't think I'd call that next to zero. I will leave researching the budget Bayer spends for advertising Aspirin to most of the world, and specifically Bayer brand Aspirin (as it's described in the US and some other nations to get around that pesky genericness) as an exercise for the reader, but I have done the math, and it's actually larger than for Band-Aids.
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Interesting)
The same people who develop drugs elsewhere in the developed world, that's who. Switzerland, for example, has a research-intensive pharma industry rivaling the US in size, and it prospers just fine without having to screw its citizens with fixed prices and special laws against shopping around.
What I want to see is a pharma industry that operates like that other industry that has a special need to invest such a large percentage of corporate operating budget into research and development - electronics. Somehow Intel manages to keep cranking out new processors at steadily increasing ratios of functionality to price, and yet still reap billions while its customers freely shop the world market for the best bargain. Why can't Pfizer do the same without having to wheedle special legal privileges from Washington?
Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, you are going to have to explain how "the rest of the world" buying a branded, 100% genuine, drug for a fraction of the US price drives up the price in the US. You also might give an example where patents are being ignored in those same markets.
Here's a recent example of a man being charged $3,766 for Zovirax cold sore cream in hospital. The same product could be bought in Walmart for $181.66 . UK price $7.
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140728/GJNEWS_01/140729484 [fosters.com]
Drug prices in the US are entirely down to the insane US health system.
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It's a lot more expensive that you think. The development networks for drug research reach into the billions. Keep in mind that when you find a compound, it has a lot of basic tests before you get to single cells, complex organism, invertebrates, vertebrates... by the time you reach mice, you're already talking about $10million+ ... researchers, grants, equipment, poorly paid graduate students. And when you get to monkeys...each monkey is $15k a pop and if any of them die, the compound almost always gets to
ROI for drug development (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:ROI for drug development (Score:4, Insightful)
There are government grants available for such research. Not all research is done by people looking for billion dollar paydays. Some people just want enough funding to get the research done and draw a salary.
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The researchers' salaries isn't where the money is going primarily; it's going into infrastructure, animal testing, support, testing, insurance, etc.
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If you're in the business of possessing a cure during an outbreak, rudimentary requirements like FDA approval are moot.
The 64,000 dollar question is can they gear up manufacturing facilities to make enough for all of us, or just enough for the privileged.... and yes, at that point, any recipient of the vaccine is privileged.
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Well, it needs to be tested, we don't know how hard it is to make, we don't know if it is successful, but it seems to be, how long can it be stored? IS the rick of outbreak worth the cost of maintaining millions of ready to go treatments?
Ebola can e contained. If/when it mutates to be airborne that's going to be an issue. Of course, since it hasn't, we don't know if the vaccines would work at all.
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The ease with which it seems to capture the attention of the masses with any threat of worldwide pandemic leads me to believe the folks that really have a lot to live for are making sure there's an option after infection.
If you have more money than your grandchildren can spend, you purchase insurance. Lots and lots of it.
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You are correct, I should have specified for humans. In my defense, that was the context.
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Ebola went from pigs to macaws via an airborn vector.
There was one for simians as well.
"Ebola is not deadly, surprise, surprise for semians/apes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:ROI for drug development (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a good, reliable page on Ebola, Reston variant: (this assumes you don't think Stanford is a cheesy school, or in on the vast conspiracy to supress all conspiracy theories, or whatever).
http://virus.stanford.edu/filo... [stanford.edu]
from this page
"twelve of the 186 people tested had serological evidence of infection with EBO-R. 22% of the workers at Ferlite Farms had positive IFAT (indirect fluorescent antibody test) titers, which was significantly higher than at the other three export facilities."
Those infection mumbers are low for a virus that normally attacks humans, like Ebola Marburg, in a setting with no precautions at all and lots of hosts, but the fact that humans have no significant symptoms from it says that the Reston variant virus does not colonize humans at all well, and so are at least marginal support for it being exceptionally likely to survive in the environment, compared to the more human lethal types. This just might indicate that Reston is airborne, but probably just indicates it survives a bit longer on surfaces or takes a little more exposure to some disinfectants to destroy than the commoner Ebola virus types. So you're halfway right about that - Reston is not presumed to have become air vectorable, it's just been raised as a possibility in discussion, and is still rated as less likely than some alternatives.
this particular shipment of nonhuman primates had a far larger number of deaths in Room F than would normally have been expected.
And there goes your record - Reston is deadly to simians, at least to cynomolgus macaques. Unless you want to stand on your obvious spelling error (yeah, it doesn't kill "semians" - I hear not even Kryptonite kills them), the poster you are "correcting" was correct.
Given a 25% accuracy rating and four spelling errors and two grammer errors in four sentences you would have a hard time persuading people to reject the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump's hairpiece is an Venusion Brainslug invader.
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rudimentary requirements like FDA approval are moot.
FDA approval was not needed, because the serum was administered in Liberia, where the FDA has no jurisdiction.
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What is the incentive for the doctors in Africa treating Ebola? Are they doing it for money? Or perhaps they are doing it out of a sense of goodwill towards their fellow human beings (that and the fact that many Christians believe God commands them to do these sorts of things).
Perhaps an "incentive" for Pharmaceutical companies who are making money hand over fist with other drugs would be to make a drug that would cure or vaccinate against a horrible disease because, i don't know...it's the right thing to
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It's all the phat loots Africa has. We all know those doctors are driving around in Ferrari and drinking champagne.
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Oddly enough I know a doctor in Botswana who's doing pretty damn well for herself.
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Perhaps an "incentive" for Pharmaceutical companies who are making money hand over fist with other drugs would be to make a drug that would cure or vaccinate against a horrible disease because, i don't know...it's the right thing to do?
Ha ha, that is hilarious! Seriously, the reason they have massive profits is because they don't care about society as much as themselves. Why on earth would they suddenly become altruistic, when they are not altruistic about any other opportunity to "SELL" medicine to make lots of profits? Think really really hard about that for a minute and you will glean why your comment is so funny.
The doctors treating patients has nothing to do with big pharmaceutical companies that view a plague as an opportunity to
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http://www.who.int/trade/gloss... [who.int]
In the face of a 30% profit margin, I'd say they're charging what the market of fear-of-death will bear, not what is just or right.
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Government funding, apparently from the NIH and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is charged with coming up with defenses to WMDs likely to be used by terrorists.
Re: ROI for drug development (Score:2)
The USA almost always has plans for crazy just in case situations. Including developing drugs no one may need for years
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That's what the Government should be for, doing things that are necessary but not profitable. What happens when government is privatized for efficiency?
Re: ROI for drug development (Score:5, Interesting)
That question has been answered many times.
The middle class fades away, Large projects stop and the society collapse.
People act like the government just appeared and hasn't been developed over time.
Also we know that the government is more efficient then the ;private industry most of the time. That's the private sectors little secret.
You can confirm that be simply looking at the federal project and see how many of them where completed on time and within budget. well of 80.
The private sector is lucky to get 30% project dun, and less then 20% within budget.
The Public sector/Private sector 80/20 has been written about many times.
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A large part of the cost of developing a drug is getting it approved as safe for human use. For instance you can buy a vaccine for
lyme disease for both your dog and your horse but there is no such legal vaccine for humans. The beginning stages of testing are
relatively cheap and you can afford to have several of them in the works if for no other reason than to pad your patent portfolio.
Many of the very early beginning stages also tend to cost nothing (i.e. A researcher happened to notice that drug X had th
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The latter part of your paragraph speaks of pharmaceuticals going bust all the time, which leads me to think we're talking about two different types of pharmaceutical companies. A quick google will show you that they go bust all the time, with debts in excess of $10 million USD, which to put it in perspective, is the amount of
Re:ROI for drug development (Score:4, Interesting)
My particular unsupported conspiracy theory is that they have weaponized Ebola, and as a result they have had a cure for a while, just now they are using it.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Considering how hard the US and Soviet Union looked at all kinds of weapons systems, serum, collected samples.
So something was collected, stored, offered this time to get some good news out.
I'm sure you meant to say testing it. (Score:3)
Granted, it's not mutually assured destruction.
It's only plausibly mutually assured destruction. That should be quite enough.
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http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/r... [cdc.gov]
Once every 20 years my ass. Average numbers don't convey a lot of information.
Averages about 1 outbreak per year if you want to define "outbreak" as "outbreak", unless you want to define it some other way. The current lab-confirmed numbers for this one are 953, with a death rate about 60%. 953 out of your "less than 4000 so far" number seems to be a hefty chunk of corpses.
People study this in federal labs, with little chance of financial gain, in order to prevent it from
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Re:ROI for drug development (Score:5, Insightful)
The drug is NOT ready. That's the whole point of this. They were given experimental "serum" which had not even reached Human trials (years away from them in fact, they had just recently reached simian trials after the mouse models which is essentially the very first step towards human trials). This stuff could have outright killed them. These two people subjected themselves to essentially untested experimentation in the hope of a miracle. They got lucky.
Had they tested this stuff on a bunch of Africans and they died can you imagine the bad press it would have generated? I can see the headlines now. "America tests drugs on poor Africans in unethical medical experimentation".
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you are saying U.S. startups should be free to inject untested compounds into Africans, because they might "get lucky". Reason fails you.
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Because when you are diagnosed with a terminal disease, with the outlook of having only a few days left to spend in agony, and a US drug company approaches you with an experimental treatment that may either cure you or kill you even sooner, are you going to reject?
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Ebola is the main bio weapon research topic of the USA since roughly 1956. As similarily was Antrax for the British.
It is not 'that' surprising that they in fact have a cure.
Surprising is, that it get published so nonchalant, considering that anti bio weapons treaties are up since 30 years or longer.
The real surprise, and hence the dubiousity of this news: a cure that is effective in a day or even in hours ... very uncommon.
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Given that Ebola is currently confined to Africa, and that a relatively small number of people have caught it (less than 4000)...and these outbreaks seem to only come along once every 20 years, where was the incentive for the drug company to create this drug? Was it good timing that it has something ready to go just now.
Will each dose be prohibitively expensive to administer in Africa, or it remains to be seen if WHO will foot the bill to the tune of 10's of millions $$.
Not once in 20. Every two years... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks
Yes the number of inflicted individuals is too small \ to trigger major financial investment.
Yes the inflicted individuals are mostly too poor to trigger major financial investment!
Yes global risk is so large most research is department of defense funded.
This is so serious and so bad a global risk I dislike thinking about it except that
the world needs to pay attention. Today the context for disease is big $$ pharma
and big $$
Re:ROI for drug development (Score:5, Informative)
Odds are the so-called "secret-serum" is called ZMapp manufactured by a small biotech company called Mapp Biopharmaceutical [mappbio.com]...
Odds are this treatment is an optimized cocktail combining the best components of MB-003 [mappbio.com] and ZMAb [defyrus.com] (both appear to be three-mouse monoclonal antibody produced by exposing mice to fragments of the Ebola virus and extracting antibodies from their blood)...
Odds are these particular antibodies are actually manufactured in a plants, specifically Nicotiana, not extracted from animal blood.
Odds are you could find this information on this internet in less than 1 minute w/o suggesting or consulting a poorly researched, highly politicized book written in alarmist form.
Unfortunately, odds are many people are unable to use the internet effectively...
media.. (Score:2, Funny)
secret serum? what is this, scooby doo?
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And he would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those rotten teenagers.
Meddling kids. The phrase you're looking for is, "meddling kids."
hmmmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:hmmmmm (Score:4, Informative)
Rashes are not bruises; most rashes are just dilated capillaries, often due to immune system activation. Of course, eventually, Ebola does cause bleeding from capillaries, but it may not have had progressed to that point. It's possible that a serum like this acts fairly quickly on a rash.
Re:hmmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, I'll feed the AC troll.
I'm not talking about "most rashes"; real physicians have words to describe different kinds of rashes. The word that describes the rash of Ebola is "purpura." The distinguishing feature of this kind of rash is that when you push on it, it doesn't stop looking like a bruise. That is because the blood isn't contained within blood vessels that can be pressurized and allow the blood to be pushed out of the way. Because IT'S A FUCKING BRUISE.
Once blood leaves the vasculature, it is broken down into a couple of proteins. Hemosiderin is taken up by white blood cells. Biliverdin turns your turds brown (eventually). They make your bruises turn "black and blue" and eventually yellow. This takes days and is the reason why purpuric rashes don't fade immediately in response to anything.
You are conflating "hives" and "purpura." Kindly pay tuition if you want to continue.
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I don't imagine the rash actually disappeared, but with the active bleeding stopped, it would look much better in short order. Of course, once the bruising develops, they'll look like hell again for a few days.
FDA? (Score:2)
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Ever hear of ethics?
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The FDA also has oversight of exported drugs and devices. They don't have to be approved for sale in the US in order to be exported, but do have to meet some requirements.
On the other end, most countries require an export certificate from the country of origin.
http://www.fda.gov/Internation... [fda.gov]
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T.A.H.I.T.I. (Score:2)
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And Sloan.
"Secret" (Score:5, Informative)
It's only "secret" in the sense that almost all pharmaceutical research is completely ignored by the media.
If you dig around you'll find some articles about ZMAPP in no-name low-impact journals like PNAS and Science.
"Secret"
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Yeah, the media is trying to create a media storm by making people think there are hidden cures.
It's really annoying.,
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TIN FOIL HAT TIME:
1) The .mil has been experimenting with ebola for decades. What biological weapons program wouldn't? In the process of experimenting, they've also developed countermeasure in case the Ruskies (or other enemy agents) are doing the same. .gov labs for awhile, awaiting for weaponized ebola.
2) These countermeasures have been sitting in secret in secret
3) Bunches of Africans die from the disease. Who cares?
4) Two white Americans get it, and suddenly "Oh, right, we have a cure."
Re:"Secret" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"Secret" (Score:4, Informative)
No, apparently the name of the coctail is "ZMapp"; "ZMAb" is one of the main constituents of "ZMapp":
http://www.mappbio.com/zmapinfo.pdf [mappbio.com]
Man, what's with those big-A little-a things - they're driving me crazy!
Some scale (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot of hype on this Ebola topic in the media.
Lets have some scale:
The population of Africa: 1 billion
http://worldpopulationreview.c... [worldpopul...review.com]
Number of people to die of Ebola in the past year: 887
http://www.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com]
The number of deaths in Liberia alone during the last flu outbreak: 5,561
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy... [worldlifeexpectancy.com]
Re:If it bleeds, lt leads. (Score:5, Informative)
Flu deaths aren't nearly as sexy as hemmoraghic fever. Someone passing away while sweating and shivering is nothing compared to having your internals turn to goo. This scared the shit out of me, no matter how small of a scale ebola currently is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
This. Ebola is a very destructive virus.
The thing with Ebola is the fatality rate, up to 90% in some cases. Influenza (flu) infects 10's of thousands in each country per year but will only kill a few thousand at most in the countries with the most limited health care systems (in western nations, it kills maybe a dozen) and these people usually die from complications caused by other illnesses or old age.
Most people fight off flu with a bit of bed rest and some chicken soup, no such luck for Ebola as it attacks . The current fatality rate for the current outbreak is 60%, with 1600 confirmed cases (880 deaths) and there are more suspected cases. Beyond this, Ebola remains infectious after death, so people handling corpses without protection can contract the virus.
My doctor scared the shit out of me with my Yellow Fever vaccination (which is still the old school style live vaccine) and that has a fatality rate of 3% (less than 1% if treated early) and the vaccine had an infection rate of 1 in 5,000,000.
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You're falling for CNN hype.
Ebola isn't even on the CDC watch list:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... [nih.gov]
It's deadly if you catch it, but catching it is extremely difficult. It's spread primarily by ingesting the droppings of fruit bats as they forge in human food stocks.
We don't have large fruit bat populations here
Nor do we store our food where bats can get at it.
Even in Africa where conditions are perfect people are rarely catching this disease.
Those treating the infected can catch it as well, but only by ing
Roundup of Ebola drugs and vaccines in Science (Score:5, Informative)
Science magazine had a good article about the drugs being developed for Ebola. One drug, TKM-Ebola, is in Phase I trials, but the FDA put them on hold because they wanted to change the protocol to protect participants' safety.
One researcher, Erica Ollmann Saphire, said that, because of the high case fatality rate, if she were exposed to Ebola, "I'd run for the freezer and ask for forgiveness instead of permission." But in cases like this, they usually can get FDA permission, under compassionate use. One German researcher got a needlestick, and they rushed the VSV-vaccine to her. But those were individual cases, in western hospitals, and they can't give an untested drug to a population in Africa (although some American pharmaceutical companies have tried that, and it didn't go too well).
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... [sciencemag.org]
Science 25 July 2014:
Vol. 345 no. 6195 pp. 364-365
DOI: 10.1126/science.345.6195.364
Infectious Diseases
Ebola drugs still stuck in lab
Martin Enserink
For you suckers who are stuck behind the paywall, it had a good table that summed it all up:
VACCINES
VSV-based vaccines. Profectus BioSciences; Public Health Agency of Canada
Adenovirus-based vaccines. At least three different labs/companies
DRUGS
TKM-Ebola (RNAi-based). Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp. In phase I trials, but the FDA put a hold
Nucleoside analog. U.S.Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
Monoclonal antibodies. Many labs/companies
AVI-7537 (antisense-based). Sarepta Therapeutics.
Everybody who does clinical research knows that most of the drugs that work great in mice, work reasonably well in monkeys, passably well in Phase I trials, poorly in Phase II trials, and not at all in Phase III trials.
There were a few articles in the New England Journal of Medicine on the FDA's fast track approvals. They found that when the FDA started speeding up drug approvals, they started approving more drugs with life-threatening side effects that had to be withdrawn from the market.
Of course, if you're dying of a disease now, the calculus is different.
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Everybody who does clinical research knows that most of the drugs that work great in mice, work reasonably well in monkeys, passably well in Phase I trials, poorly in Phase II trials, and not at all in Phase III trials.
This reminds me of the problems with using animal models [neavs.org] in drug testing. To put it bluntly, if you go back to drugs that were used before mice drug trials were 'the way to go', an awful lot of our 'go to' drugs would never pass the mice trials.
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What we really need is a human body simulator, down to the molecules.
That would be nice, but rather un-realistic currently. We are currently working on a worm, and you can see progress at: http://www.openworm.org/ [openworm.org] . It's cool, cutting edge, open source, and all that, but 1. the models are really complicated and we don't know all the parameters; and 2. they take a long time to run. In a couple of years, we should (cross fingers) be able to see the effect of chemicals on a nematode, so if it gets sick, we can simulate treating it.
Please note that C. elegans has 959 cel
Secret, my ass (Score:5, Informative)
Mapp Biopharmaceutical have been publishing articles about their ebola research in scientific journals since 2011. They seem to be a very secretive at all.
Maybe CNN thinks it's a secret because it hasn't been covered in the mainstream press - TMZ and Entertainment Weekly have completely ignored the company.
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It's "secret" in the same sense that Zimmerman was a "white man" ...because race-baiting is a surefire way to gin up an audience.
To hell with the facts. And consequences. Nobody pays us to pay attention to those.
Mouse studies (Score:3)
I found the quote:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... [sciencemag.org]
Science 18 July 2014:
Vol. 345 no. 6194 pp. 252-257
DOI: 10.1126/science.345.6194.252
The elusive heart fix
Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
“In mouse studies there's always dramatic improvement,” says Joseph Wu, a cardiologist studying stem cells at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “Once you go to a large animal study, it's moderate improvement, once you go to a phase I trial, it's decent improvement, and once you go to phase II, phase III, there's no improvement. This happens again and again and again. It's the entire field of biological research.”
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Re:..but we won't give any more doses to anyone el (Score:5, Informative)
To quote TFA:
"It is important to keep in mind that a large-scale provision of treatments and vaccines that are in very early stages of development has a series of scientific and ethical implications," the organization said in a statement.
Which means, we haven't figured (worked) out yet the costs and payment plans for this drug, so we aren't going to use it to help those people already suffering who otherwise have no chance of survival. Let's just say they are "expendable", in the name of commerce, of course.
If anyone believes that hogwash about ensuring safety and efficacy and yada yada...well the mighty dollar beats all that.
No, what it means is that if they inject somebody with a large therapeutic dose of a drug that has only been tested in mice, they're liable to have life-threatening adverse reactions, like anaphylactic shock from the mouse antibodies, and it's much easier to keep the adverse reactions from killing them in a state-of-the-art western hospital than it is in the field, where they have trouble maintaining refrigeration, and don't have x-ray machines (much less CAT scans), among many other problems.
I can't find the quote, but a researcher told Science that things work great in mice, well in monkeys, passably well in phase I trials, poorly in phase II trials, and not at all in phase III trials.
Actually, it's the pharmaceutical companies that want to speed up drug approvals in order to increase their profits, and the Clinton and Bush administrations gave them their wish. According to a few articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, every time the FDA sped up drug approvals, they wound up approving drugs that had fatal adverse effects and had to be withdrawn from the market, like that Merck COX inhibitor.
You can't make a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.
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You can't make a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.
I'd gladly volunteer to test this hypothesis if the most likely outcome weren't 9 babies in 9 months.
Re:Secret for how long? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it might have also killed everyone you gave it to? You do get that experimental drugs do that right? There was a case just recently where 4 guys were given an experimental Phase I human trial immunobooster, and within 20 minutes 2 of them were in multiple organ failure. The 2 who were not were given the placebo.
And this was in a trial where we actually had done everything right and the animal models suggested everything should be fine (people have gone over it with a fine tooth comb to figure out what went wrong there).