Article on Grant Rewards for science designs (including better protective suits for Ebola)

[emilynghiem]

Help Wanted Unlikely Geniuses To Solve Public Health Problems Goats and Soda NPR

This article mentions grants awarded to innovative designs, particularly to save lives through advancements in medicine and public health.

One award is $5 million to design a better protective suit for health workers in the heat of Africa.

Fighting Ebola A Grand Challenge for Development

If you have direct links to other sources related to this, could you please post here?

One of the charities in Liberia that was already operating before the Ebola outbreak,
won a grant for their program in providing education for girls to break the
cycle of poverty, I think for $1 million through an online contest that relied on votes.
2012 Chase American Giving Awards -- Vote for Abigail on Pinterest
More Than Me Getting girls off the street and into school in Liberia West Africa

If you find any links to organizations or contests like that, please add them!
Any comments or referrals to sits or links are appreciated. Thanks!

 

[mamooth]

3 Girls Won The Google Science Fair With A Bacteria-Based Plan To Solve The Food Crisis

Google Science Fair Winners Crop Bacteria - Business Insider
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After 11 months of hard work and dedication, the three teen microbiologists discovered that they could make crops yield more food and shorten the time it takes a plant to sprout from a seed — a process called germination. They shorten this time by infecting the crops with a bit of bacteria that's been known to be advantageous to other crop plants.

Their results have huge implications for increasing agricultural productivity and easing world hunger.
---

 

[emilynghiem]

3 Girls Won The Google Science Fair With A Bacteria-Based Plan To Solve The Food Crisis

Google Science Fair Winners Crop Bacteria - Business Insider
---
After 11 months of hard work and dedication, the three teen microbiologists discovered that they could make crops yield more food and shorten the time it takes a plant to sprout from a seed — a process called germination. They shorten this time by infecting the crops with a bit of bacteria that's been known to be advantageous to other crop plants.

Their results have huge implications for increasing agricultural productivity and easing world hunger.
---

Yay for Bacteria! Congratulations to this Team, Wow!
And thanks for a great, informative post!

 

[emilynghiem]

Ebola Drug Made By Tobacco Plants

here's an article on how the ZMapp antibodies are cultured in tobacco leaves.
But one of them doesn't grow very well in the leaves, and that's why it takes so long to produce.

Mapp Bio News

what about extending the contest prize to find a better culture for producing
the drugs faster?

"
The doses administered to the U.S. aid workers exhausted a nearly nonexistent supply, according to its manufacturer, Mapp Biopharmaceuticals. But that’s not because it takes a long time to manufacture the antibodies that make up the ZMapp cocktail. ZMapp is taking longer to produce in large quantities because one of the three antibodies in the cocktail doesn’t grow well in the plants—which is how ZMapp is produced.

The process involves growing tobacco plants, not in the acres of fields earmarked by tobacco companies for their cigarettes, but in a controlled environment in a greenhouse, for six weeks. Then, the leaves of the plants are injected or infused with a plant bacterium that carries a valuable payload — the genes for the antibodies that can bind to and neutralize the Ebola virus. The plant cells treat the new genes as one of their own, and start making the antibody. It takes about 14g of these antibodies to treat a patient, says Yuri Gleba, CEO of Icon Genetics, the German company that pioneered the platform, and to produce that much requires around 78 tobacco plants and about seven to 10 days.

A team led by Gleba is helping Mapp Biopharmaceuticals to optimize that production and to make the entire process more efficient so it requires fewer plants. “If everything is properly optimized, those plants can be full of that antibody,” he says. (Mapp officials declined to comment for this article on the status of their ZMapp production.)"

 

[emilynghiem]

BTW
I read comments and articles online that Ebola being a level 4 pathogen,
the biohazard suits that are supposed to be used are much higher cost and level
than the simpler protection used by health workers, as the ones infected in both US and Spain after treating Ebola patients.

Why not require the person suspected to wear a suit (not the expensive 1,000 dollar ones, but full coverage,
that can be decontaminated and burned afterwards)
to keep from contaminating the ambulance and anyone else in the hospital facilities.

While the numbers are low, it would be cheaper to have a suit for the suspected person,
completely covered and disposable, instead of risk of infecting all the other people by not having suits for all of them.

 

[emilynghiem]

OpenIDEO - How might we rapidly equip and empower the care community to fight Ebola - Gender Based Violence occurs even after survival from Ebola

On the Ebola Challenge website,
I applauded a post asking to address the issue of rape and sexual violence against women in Guinea and across Africa
since AIDS and now Ebola can be spread by semen and bodily fluids.

I invite all members to help join this discussion and post your ideas, or
back up an existing idea that deserves attention as this one!

My comment is
"Thank you for this! We need to address the rape and trafficking issues anyway. Combining efforts will unite people on all sides to put down these ROOT problems exacerbating the spread of sickness. Great point of focus, that will solve a multitude of other problems if we address THIS one! Thanks!"

Is there already a thread on USMB for addressing Trafficking in Africa?
What is the followup on the missing schoolgirls kidnapped and sold into slavery to raise funds for militant terrorist factions?

Can you please post links here on this thread that tie in with stopping abuse and trafficking
in order to prevent the spread of AIDS Ebola and other diseases plaguing Africa.