Ebola cases surge

[Manonthestreet]

The Ebola virus outbreak that began this spring in Guinea, West Africa, is refusing to fade out. Cases have spread into other countries in West Africa, including Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the current case count is staggering. With about 560 suspected cases (70 percent confirmed) and a death rate of more than 65 percent, it’s the largest and most lethal Ebola virus outbreak on record. The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa Is Just Getting Worse - The Daily Beast

 

[waltky]

Can ebola be prevented?...

Ebola cannot be cured but west Africa's epidemic may have been preventable
8 Jul 2014: The gaps in Sierra Leone's health system reflect need for support so that such diseases do not wreak havoc in future

The role of the international community in current crises in the Central African Republic and northern Nigeria may be mired in confusion, but it can do something about the Ebola epidemic in west Africa. The outbreak of the virus, which started in Guinea and has spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone, is the deadliest in recorded history, with Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) declaring the situation out of control. There are more than 759 cases across 60 sites since the first ones were confirmed in March – that's almost 50 known cases per week and a 20% increase in cases since 23 June. Almost 500 people have died from the disease, which has spread across international borders.

Ebola has a fatality rate of up to 90% – once you have it, your chances of survival may be just one in 10. There is no vaccine and no cure; the only way to stop the virus is to prevent it or treat the symptoms if diagnosed early enough. It is spread by contact with the fluids of infected people or animals, such as urine, sweat and blood. During the rainy season, from June to September in west Africa, the spread of bodily fluids is a high risk. But here is where the international community can help. The health systems in west African countries are weak: three countries ranked 174 (Liberia), 177 (Sierra Leone) and 178 (Guinea) out of 186 countries for human development, according to the UN development programme. So, one of the world's most deadly viruses is plaguing three of the countries least equipped to cope with it.

Health workers in Kenema, Sierra Leone, take blood samples to test for the Ebola virus at a screening tent in a local government hospital.

In Sierra Leone, I have been involved in a two-year research programme to prevent malnutrition. This has involved spending time at some of the government-run peripheral health units (PHUs) in northern Sierra Leone, on the border with Guinea. The PHUs are the frontline of healthcare – assuming, of course, you can reach one of the 1,228 clinics across the country (one community we visited is a 6km walk from the nearest PHU). When access to state health services is limited; locals often turn to traditional healers, who sometimes misdiagnose Ebola and treat it as a curse. The PHUs are critical in providing immunisations, malaria treatment, delivering babies, providing free medical care to pregnant and lactating mothers and children under five – but they are not without serious problems. Staff often lack good-quality training, partly because they tend to learn through cascade models, where one person might train 10 others, who in turn train 10 more, and so on – operating like a system of Chinese whispers with all the potential miscommunication this can involve.

There is a high turnover of PHU staff owing to poor working conditions: for example, nurses earn just $55 (£32) per month – roughly $1.80 per day – meaning that new, untrained staff are commonly found at the frontline of Sierra Leone's healthcare system. A lack of quality training means staff are not always equipped to deliver appropriate healthcare messages or treatment. In fact, such professionals make up a large number of those who have died in the Ebola outbreak, having failed to take precautions in dealing with infected patients. The PHUs often face shortages of equipment and medicine. To bring the virus under control, countries need more help from external partners. In the immediate term, emergency humanitarian support is needed to treat those infected and prevent further cases; MSF says it has reached its limit and that a massive deployment of resources is required. If donors and individuals want to support aid that shows tangible results in relatively short timeframes, supporting the response to the Ebola virus seems a good option that could save potentially thousands of lives.

MORE

 

[waltky]

ZMAPP given to Liberian ebola patients...

Liberia: 3 receiving untested Ebola drug improving
Aug 19,`14 -- Three Liberian health workers receiving an experimental drug for Ebola are showing signs of recovery, officials said Tuesday, though medical experts caution it is not certain if the drug is effective.

The World Health Organization said that the death toll for West Africa's Ebola outbreak has climbed past 1,200 but that there are tentative signs that progress is being made in containing the disease. The three Liberians are being treated with the last known doses of ZMapp, a drug that had earlier been given to two infected Americans and a Spaniard. The Americans are also improving, but the Spaniard died. "The medical professionals have informed the Liberian information ministry their progress is `remarkable,'" the ministry said in a statement, adding that the patients are showing "very positive signs of recovery." Experts have said it is unclear if ZMapp, which had never before been tested in humans, is effective. Even if it is, the California-based maker has said more supplies won't be available for months.

In the meantime, experts say the best way to stop the spread of Ebola in West Africa is to identify the sick, isolate them from the healthy and monitor everyone with whom they have been in contact. More than 1,200 people have died of Ebola in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria in the current outbreak, and more than 2,200 have been sickened, the WHO said. Authorities have struggled to treat and isolate the sick, in part because of widespread fear that treatment centers are places where people go to die. Many sick people have hidden in their homes, relatives have sometimes taken their loved ones away from health centers, and mobs have occasionally attacked health workers. On Saturday, residents of the West Point slum in Liberia's capital of Monrovia attacked a center where people were being monitored for Ebola. The raid was triggered by fears that people with the disease were being brought there from all over the country, the Information Ministry said Tuesday.

During the raid, dozens of people waiting to be screened for Ebola fled the center. Looters made off with items, including bloody sheets and mattresses that could spread the infection. All the patients who fled are now being screened at a hospital in Monrovia, and those who tested positive are being treated, the ministry said. It was unclear how many of the 37 who fled were confirmed with Ebola. In addition, residents of the slum have agreed to return any stolen items, officials said. Liberian authorities are searching for a pastor who ran away from a different Ebola treatment center outside Monrovia. State radio asked the public to look out for the preacher but did not say whether he had tested positive for Ebola. The WHO said it is seeing some encouraging signs in other parts of West Africa. In Guinea, people from villages that had previously rejected outside help were beginning to seek medical care, according to a WHO statement. The statement said the situation is "less alarming" in Guinea than in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Although the outbreak began in Guinea, Liberia has now recorded the highest number of deaths and Sierra Leone the most cases. The WHO also said there is "cautious optimism" that the spread of the virus in Nigeria can be stopped. So far, all recorded cases have been linked to one man, who flew from Liberia to Nigeria while infected. "The outbreak is not under control," the WHO cautioned. "As recent experience shows, progress is fragile, with a real risk that the outbreak could experience another flare-up." To try to stem the spread of Ebola, officials have imposed quarantines and travel restrictions on the sick and those in contact with them, sometimes shutting off entire villages and counties. Those restrictions are limiting access to food and other necessities, said the WHO. The U.N. World Food Program has said that it is preparing to deliver food to 1 million people over the next three months.

News from The Associated Press

 

[billdad19912114]

To tell you the truth, they don't need to get grimey over that situation they need to keep every head at one whole estate and in case system of things find a better sponsor or reason to live.

 

[waltky]

Ebola virus rapidly mutating...

Gene Studies of Ebola in Sierra Leone Show Virus Mutating Fast
August 28, 2014 —Genetic studies of some of the earliest Ebola cases in Sierra Leone reveal more than 300 genetic changes in the virus as it leapt from person to person, changes that could blunt the effectiveness of diagnostic tests and experimental treatments now in development, researchers said on Thursday.

“We found the virus is doing what viruses do. It's mutating,” said Pardis Sabeti of Harvard University and the Broad Institute, who led the massive study of samples from 78 people in Sierra Leone, all of whose infections could be traced to a faith healer whose claims of a cure attracted Ebola patients from Guinea, where the virus first took hold. The findings, published in Science, suggest the virus is mutating quickly and in ways that could affect current diagnostics and future vaccines and treatments, such as GlaxoSmithKline's Ebola vaccine, which was just fast-tracked to begin clinical trials, or the antibody drug ZMapp, being developed by California biotech Mapp Biopharmaceutical. The findings come as the World Health Organization said that the epidemic could infect more than 20,000 people and spread to more countries. A WHO representative could not immediately be reached for comment on the latest genetic study.

Study coauthor Robert Garry of Tulane University said the virus is mutating at twice the rate in people as it was in animal hosts, such as fruit bats. Garry said the study has shown changes in the glycoprotein, the surface protein that binds the virus to human cells, allowing it to start replicating in its human host. “It's also what your immune system will recognize,” he said. In an unusual step, the researchers posted the sequences online as soon as they became available, giving other researchers early access to the data.

Erica Ollmann Saphire of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, has already checked the data to see if it impacts the three antibodies in ZMapp, a drug in short supply that has been tried on several individuals, including the two U.S. missionaries who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone and who have since recovered. “It appears that they do not [affect ZMapp],” said Saphire, who directs a consortium to develop antibody treatments for Ebola and related viruses. But she said the data “will be critical to seeing if any of the other antibodies in our pool could be affected.” Saphire said the speed with which Sabeti and colleagues mapped genetic changes in the virus gives researchers information that “will also be critical” to companies developing RNA-based therapeutics. That could impact treatments under way from Vancouver-based Tekmira Pharmaceuticals and privately-held Profectus BioSciences of Tarrytown, New York.

Part of what makes the data useful is the precise picture it paints as the epidemic unfolded. Sabeti credits years of work by her lab, colleagues at Tulane and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation in developing a response network for Lassa fever, a virus similar to Ebola that is endemic in West Africa. Several of the study authors gave their lives to the work, including Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, the beloved “hero” doctor from the Kenema Government Hospital, who died from Ebola. The team had been doing surveillance for two months when the first case of Ebola arrived from Guinea on May 25. That case involved a “sowei” or tribal healer, whose claim of a cure lured sick Ebola victims from nearby Guinea. “When she contracted Ebola and died, there were a lot of people who came to her funeral,” Garry said. One of these was a young pregnant woman who became infected and traveled to Kenema Government Hospital, where she was diagnosed with Ebola.

With the Lassa surveillance team in place, they quickly began testing samples. “We've been able to capture the initial spread from that one person and to follow all of these contacts and everything with sequencing,” Garry said. The team used a technique called deep sequencing in which sequences are done repeatedly to generate highly specific results, allowing them to see not only how the virus is mutating from person to person, but how it is mutating in cells within the same person. What is not clear from the study is whether the mutations are fueling the epidemic by allowing the virus to grow better in people and become easier to spread. That will require further tests in the lab, Garry said.

Gene Studies of Ebola in Sierra Leone Show Virus Mutating Fast

See also:

Ebola Vaccine from GSK Fast-tracked into Clinical Trials
August 28, 2014 — An experimental Ebola vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline is being fast-tracked into human studies and the company plans to build a stockpile of up to 10,000 doses for emergency deployment, if results are good.

The research work is being accelerated with funding from an international consortium, reflecting mounting concern over the worst outbreak of the disease that has killed more than 1,500 people in West Africa. GSK's candidate vaccine, being co-developed with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), is expected to be given to healthy volunteers in Britain and the United States from about mid-September, with the program then being extended to Gambia and Mali. Britain's biggest drugmaker said on Thursday the Phase I trials would start as soon as they received ethical and regulatory approvals.

The NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is also working on a wider program of clinical trials, including tests of a version of the GSK vaccine that may fight a second strain of Ebola, as well as the West African one. In addition, U.S. researchers plan human tests of a vaccine developed by Canadian government scientists, which has been licensed to NewLink Genetics. The trials being announced will enroll healthy volunteers with the goal of determining whether the vaccine is safe and whether it provokes a protective immune response. The aim is to complete these tests by the end of 2014, after which vaccines could be deployed on an emergency basis.

Race to test

In a grim assessment of the deadly disease, the World Health Organization said on Thursday that the current Ebola outbreak was continuing to accelerate and could infect more than 20,000 people. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity, which is helping to fund the vaccine trials, said the effectiveness of vaccines and drugs could only be assessed during epidemics, so it was vital to test products now. GSK plans to begin making up to about 10,000 additional doses of its vaccine at the same time as the initial clinical trials, so if they are successful vaccine could be made available immediately for an emergency immunization program. NewLink has also contracted for the manufacture of increased supplies of its vaccine.

A steering committee made up of senior officials from NIH and the U.S. Department of Defense also approved last week the first step toward using three advanced laboratories to manufacture Ebola vaccines and treatments, a person familiar with the planning told Reuters. The three labs, in Texas, Maryland and North Carolina, were set up in 2012 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in partnership with private industry to respond to pandemics or chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear threats.. The GSK vaccine consists of a common cold virus, called an adenovirus, that has been engineered to carry two genes of the Ebola virus. Animal testing has shown that when the adenovirus infects cells the Ebola genes produce harmless proteins that stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies to Ebola. GSK acquired the vaccine after buying Swiss-based biotech company Okairos for 250 million euros ($330 million) last year.

Ebola Vaccine from GSK Fast-tracked into Clinical Trials

 

[waltky]

Ebola now in Senegal...

WHO: Senegal Ebola case 'a top priority emergency'
31 Aug.`14 — The effort to contain Ebola in Senegal is "a top priority emergency," the World Health Organization said Sunday, as the government continued tracing everyone who came in contact with a Guinean student who has tested positive for the deadly disease in the capital, Dakar.

Senegal faces an "urgent need" for support and supplies including hygiene kits and personal protective equipment for health workers, the WHO said in a statement Sunday. "These needs will be met with the fastest possible speed," the WHO said. The U.N. health agency provided new information on the movements of the 21-year-old student in the city before he was diagnosed with Ebola. Senegal confirmed that the student had tested positive for Ebola on Friday, making the country the fifth in West Africa to be affected by an outbreak that has killed more than 1,500 people. The student showed up at a hospital in Dakar on Aug. 26 but did not reveal that he had been in contact with other Ebola victims, said Health Minister Awa Marie Coll Seck. The next day, an epidemiological surveillance team in neighboring Guinea alerted Senegalese authorities that it had lost track of a person it was monitoring three weeks earlier, and that the person may have crossed into Senegal.

The student was tracked to the hospital in Dakar that same day and was immediately quarantined, and a test confirmed he had Ebola, Seck said. In Sunday's statement, the WHO said the student arrived in Dakar by road on Aug. 20 and was staying with relatives "in the outskirts of the city." It said that on Aug. 23, he went to a medical facility seeking treatment for fever, diarrhea and vomiting, all symptoms of Ebola. He was treated for malaria, however, and continued to stay with his relatives before turning up at the Dakar hospital on Aug. 26. "Though the investigation is in its early stages, he is not presently known to have traveled elsewhere," said the WHO, which received its information from Senegal's health ministry. The presence of Ebola in Senegal, a tourist and transport hub, could complicate efforts to bring the outbreak under control. The country has already closed its land border with Guinea, where the outbreak originated, and barred air and sea travel from Sierra Leone and Liberia in an attempt to keep the disease out.

In Dakar on Sunday, at least one pharmacy was limiting purchases of hand sanitizer to one small bottle per person because of rising demand — underscoring fears that the number of cases in the city could soon multiply. Senegalese authorities have isolated the house where the Guinean student was staying as well as the medical facility where he sought treatment prior to visiting the Dakar hospital. There is no cure or licensed treatment for Ebola, so health workers can only provide supportive care to patients such as keeping them hydrated. The Guinean student "is doing very well," a doctor monitoring his case in Dakar said Sunday. "This morning when I called the hospital, the doctor told me that the patient had no complaints and that his fever had disappeared," said Dr. Gallaye Ka in an interview with the private radio station RFM.

Health care workers are especially vulnerable to infection. The WHO says 240 health workers have contracted the disease during the current outbreak and more than half of those have died. In Sierra Leone on Sunday, officials said they had avoided a strike threatened by workers at an Ebola treatment center in the east of the country, the region hardest hit by the outbreak. Protective equipment is being sent to the health workers and a "monthly incentive allowance" will be paid on Monday, health ministry spokesman Sidie Yahya Tunis told The Associated Press. On Friday, Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma replaced Health Minister Miatta Kargbo with Abu Bakarr Fofanah, a move his office described as necessary to more efficiently combat the outbreak. Kargbo was recalled to work in the president's office.

WHO Senegal Ebola case a top priority emergency - Yahoo News

 

[pismoe]

interesting , wonder how big it will get .

 

[LAfrique]

I think the ebola virus is getting worse because it was meant to be. Center for Disease Control (CDC) is now reporting about 4,494 deaths from ebola in West Africa, but Liberia is demanding 80,000 body bags to bury its ebola dead - Liberia needs nearly 80 000 more body bags Ebola advances Breaking News Today s top news stories

Ebola is not a new virus and is also known by various names; the virus just got re-introduced in Africa. - Viral hemorrhagic fever - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia and DoveMed


I believe ebola, like AIDS and Swineflu, is the result of scientific experiment. However, one very effective way of fighting diseases and infections is hand-wash frequently. Also boosting your immune system with proper diet - such as eating foods high in Vitamin C, and eating your fruits and vegetables are very helpful.

 

[waltky]

Bats now carry ebola...

New Ebola species is reported for first time in a decade
Jul 28, 2018 - The family of Ebola viruses has just gotten a bit bigger.[/i]

The government of Sierra Leone has announced that a new species of Ebola, the sixth, has been discovered there in bats. It has been called, provisionally, the Bombali virus, after a district in the north of the country where it was found. There’s no evidence the new virus has infected people, although EcoHealth Alliance, an environmental nonprofit group involved in the discovery, said on Twitter that it has the potential to infect human cells. The discovery was made by scientists from the University of California at Davis and Columbia University as part of a U.S.-funded effort to find unknown viruses that have the potential to cause outbreaks in people. “It is really interesting. I think it’s exciting. But I think we have a lot of work to do to really understand if it is a pathogen and whether it does or doesn’t pose a threat,” Tracey Goldstein, of the One Health Institute at UC Davis, told STAT on Friday.

Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, said a scientific paper detailing the discovery is in the publication pipeline. Some journal forbid public discussion of work they are considering publishing and Goldstein would not say anything about where and when the work would be published. The normal process for announcing the discovery of a new virus is through a peer-reviewed journal, where the scientists making the claim lay out details of how they found the virus — or in this case, genetic evidence of a virus — and the work they did to prove that it was new, and not simply a new strain of an already known pathogen. However, Sierra Leone, which had been notified of the discovery, wanted to first make the announcement to local press on Thursday. “They want to preempt negative rumors, and are rolling out education programs to reduce potential for spillover,” Daszak said.

Doctors help each other with their protective suits during an Ebola virus drill at the Doctor Ramon de Lara hospital in the Dominican Air Force base at Santo Domingo​

Goldstein said the virus was discovered in two types of bats of the Molossid family, Angolan free-tailed bats and Little free-tailed bats. These two species of bats roost together, Goldstein said. They are found widely across sub-Saharan Africa. The infected bats were found roosting in people’s homes, she reported in ProMED, an online infectious disease reporting system. The scientists did not try to extract live viruses from samples taken from the bats, Goldstein said. Viral fragments – RNA – were detected; there was enough material to sequence “an almost complete genome,” Daszak said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have received samples from bats that tested positive for the Bombali virus.

Stuart Nichol, chief of the viral special pathogens branch, said the CDC scientists will try to see if they can extract a whole infectious virus from oral and rectal swabs taken from the bats. Nichol said it’s clear from the genetic sequence of the Bombali virus that it is sufficiently different from other types of ebolaviruses to qualify as a separate species. Whether the virus is dangerous to humans isn’t currently known. The scientists who discovered it made a copy of the main protein on the exterior of the virus — using the genetic code as the recipe, Nichol said. They put that protein on what’s called a pseudovirus, a benign synthetic virus-like entity that is used in research. The pseudovirus bearing the Bombali virus protein was able to infect human cells, he said. But you cannot conclude from that that the Bombali virus would sicken people. “Just because it enters human cells doesn’t mean it will cause human disease,” Nichol said.

MORE

 

[waltky]

Deadly Ebola Outbreak Confirmed in Eastern DRC...

Deadly Ebola Outbreak Confirmed in Eastern DRC
August 01, 2018 - Four cases of the Ebola virus have been confirmed in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, officials confirmed Wednesday.

Julien Paluku, governor of North Kivu province, announced the outbreak on Twitter, just a week after Congolese and U.N. health officials announced the end of a separate outbreak that killed 33 people in the country’s northwest. There is no evidence yet suggesting the two outbreaks in the Congo are linked. “Although we did not expect to face a tenth epidemic so early, the detection of the virus is an indicator of the proper functioning of the surveillance system,” said the country’s health minister, Oly Ilunga Kalenga, in a statement.

Ebola was first identified in the Congo in 1976. A highly infective virus, it can be spread via contact with animals or the bodily fluids of the infected — including the dead. The health ministry said there were 26 cases of hemorrhagic fever in the North Kivu province, including 20 deaths. Six samples from these patients were tested, and four tested positive for Ebola, the ministry said.

Health care workers wear virus protective gear at a treatment center in Bikoro Democratic Republic of Congo​

Officials have said they now feel better prepared for Ebola outbreaks, in sharp contrast to the 2014 epidemic of the virus, which killed more than 11,000 people, mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

To contain the most recent outbreak, health workers distributed an experimental but effective vaccine to anyone who had come into contact with those infected. "We had a vaccine — and that I think is going to be extremely important for the future of Ebola control," Peter Salama, deputy director-general of emergency preparedness and response at the World Health Organization, told CNN of the July outbreak.


Experts from the health ministry will arrive in the region on Thursday to coordinate a response to the virus, the ministry said.

Deadly Ebola Outbreak Confirmed in Eastern DRC

 

[waltky]

WHO Expects Ebola To Spread In Congo In Areas Too Dangerous To Send Workers...

WHO Expects Ebola To Spread In Congo In Areas Too Dangerous To Send Workers
August 17, 2018 • The World Health Organization says violence and insecurity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's North Kivu region is preventing health workers from stopping the spread of Ebola.

The World Health Organization said Friday that security concerns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's North Kivu region were preventing aid workers from reaching certain areas — and leaving open the possibility of the Ebola virus spreading. At least 1,500 people could be exposed to the virus, WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic told reporters in Geneva, according to Reuters. Congo's health ministry declared an outbreak of Ebola on Aug. 1 in the North Kivu region. As of Wednesday, the WHO reports 51 confirmed cases and 27 probable cases of Ebola in the region, with 44 people (17 confirmed, 27 probable) having died of the disease. "We don't know if we are having all transmission chains identified. We expect to see more cases as a result of earlier infections and infection developing into illness," Jasarevic reportedly said. "We still don't have a full epidemiological picture. ... The worst-case scenario is that we have these security blind spots where the epidemic could take hold that we don't know about," the wire service quoted him as saying.

An Ebola patient is being checked by two medical workers on Wednesday in Beni, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's North Kivu region.​

North Kivu — "a lawless, mineral-rich area in the northeast of the country," as NPR's Jason Beaubien describes it — is home to 8 million people. "Over the last decade armed groups in North Kivu have massacred civilians and each other while vying for control of the province's deposits of gold, diamond and coltan, an ore used in cellphones and other electronics," Beaubien reports. The WHO says the area "has been experiencing intense insecurity and worsening humanitarian crisis, with over one million internally displaced people and a continuous efflux of refugees to the neighbouring countries, including Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania."

About 1,500 miles away in the DRC's northwest Équateur province, the WHO had just declared a previous Ebola outbreak over on July 24. It said the next day that 33 people had died in that outbreak that had been declared in early May — a relative success compared with the devastating outbreak in 2014 through 2016 in West Africa that left more than 11,300 people dead. The WHO's response in May involved the first widespread use of the experimental Ebola vaccine rVSV-ZEBOV since testing started in 2015. On Friday, the WHO said more than 500 people, including health workers, had been vaccinated against the disease in the North Kivu outbreak.

WHO Expects Ebola To Spread In Congo In Areas Too Dangerous To Send Workers

 

[waltky]

Antibodies Could Knock Out Ebola Virus...

Antibodies Could Knock Out Ebola Virus
August 17, 2018 - In 1995, a patient sick with the Ebola virus, in what was then called Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, miraculously recovered from this deadly disease. At that time, when the virus first jumped from animals to man, Ebola meant almost certain death.

Doctors found that this patient had antibodies to fight the virus in his bloodstream even after he recovered. Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, invited the patient to the U.S., where researchers cloned the cell that had helped him beat Ebola. "We brought the person back to the United States to draw his blood and try to clone the B cells that make the antibodies that this person had produced ... to then, essentially, clear his virus and, hopefully, protect him against any future exposure," Fauci told VOA.

Because the NIH scientists made numerous copies of that cell, it is called a monoclonal antibody — in this case, mAB114. It's hoped that it can be used to target the Zaire strain of Ebola currently spreading in eastern Congo. Fauci said mAB114 is still experimental. "We have done a number of tests in an animal model and have shown that when you infect an animal up to five days after they become infected, and you passively transfer this antibody, you can actually protect the animals from getting sick and they recover," he said. Not all treatments that work in animals work in humans.

Health care workers from the World Health Organization prepare to give an Ebola vaccination to a front-line aid worker in Beni, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Aug 10, 2018.​

Fauci's staff is currently conducting a phase one clinical trial in volunteers at the NIH hospital to make sure mAB114 is safe. So far, no one can say whether the treatment works, but due to the dire situation in Congo, and the fear the virus will spread in the armed conflict that is going on in the region, Fauci said the antibody has been given to five people with Ebola. At a news conference Tuesday, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said he had been told they were doing well. As of now, there's no approved treatment for the disease, although there is a vaccine that protects people who may have been exposed to the virus but who are not sick.

Other experimental treatments are also being used to help end the outbreak in Congo. One of them is ZMapp, a combination of three monoclonal antibodies. In 2016, NIH found ZMapp safe and well-tolerated, but without an outbreak, it is impossible to prove effectiveness. Fauci said another antiviral drug, remdesivir, is being used in patients with Ebola from West Africa, even though that outbreak is over. Scientists have found the Ebola virus can remain in the semen, so men are being treated to prevent further spread.

Remdesivir, or GS-5734, is produced by Gilead. On its website, Gilead saysremdesivir is thought to work by blocking a key enzyme the virus needs to reproduce itself. Tomas Cihlar, Gilead's vice president for biology, is quoted as saying, "Based on animal studies, we believe that the compound is able to penetrate the organs and tissues throughout the body where Ebola replicates." So far, there are no proven treatments for Ebola. Scientists are hopeful that that therapeutic antibodies could be the best way to stop this virus. An international study led by Scripps Research suggests that antibodies may be valuable treatments against new viruses and could help a patient's immune system fight the Ebola virus after being infected.

Antibodies Could Knock Out Ebola Virus