Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat | Hacker News Reader

Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat

wsj.com

346 pointsmuriithi31 comments

Clever strategy

Dr. Muyembe set out on his path to an Ebola treatment during the 1995 outbreak. He transferred blood from five survivors to eight patients, hoping that the antibodies that kept some people alive would keep others from dying. Seven of the patients who received the blood transfusion recovered.

It's the first thing I'd try... because I've seen it done in movies.

I wonder what an Ethics Review Board would have to say about this...

Well lets see? It had a 90% death rate as a disease I would gladly give, receive or beg for it for myself or my child.

Note that the survivability of Ebola is much higher if you are in an hospital. Basically, if you have access to IV hydration.

About what particularly? Blood transfusions in general are neither new nor rare.

Note it's survivors, not still sick patients, having their blood taken

Serum based treatments are a known and well-documented technique, and not particularly exotic or unethical.

This seems similar to an old technique, 'inoculation', which predates vaccination and was used with some success to protect against smallpox.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inoculation

It's like horse serum. It isn't a less deadly infection conferring the benefit, it is the immune system components of the blood, the antibodies.

https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/horse-serum

Worth pointing out that there are two Ebola vaccines on the market. One is a recombinant vesticular stomavirus, VSV-EBOV, that was engineered to express an Ebola glycoprotein. It was found to be reliably efficient up to 5 days before infection in macaques. It requires only one dose to be effective, because the VSV will replicate in the host to some degree (asymptomatically) and produce a strong immune response.

There is also another 2-dose vaccine that is actually being distributed. I don't know much about it, but requiring a second dose likely means it's a protein fragment or attenuated Ebola virus, likely making it more heat stable and actually easier to distribute. Compliance is an issue, but it has proven effective in ring vaccination usage (vaccination of those around people who have contracted the disease).

There's also been some initiative to grow human Ebola antibodies in crops and distribute those as well.

As usual, the primary challenge to stopping Ebola spread is the political and social climate in the war torn DRC.

What happened to the Chinese scientist who developed the Ebola cure ZMapp?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ebola-henipah-china-...

This seems to be the latest news on it:

> In August 2019, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s national health authorities, the World Health Organization, and the National Institutes of Health announced that they would stop using ZMapp, along with all other Ebola treatments except REGN-EB3 and mAb114, in their ongoing clinical trials, citing the higher mortality rates of patients not treated with REGN-EB3 and mAb114

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMapp#Use_during_the_2014%E2%8...

So seems it's just used in some cases today.

https://outline.com/zXFSvv

Outline works, this link is valid.

Thanks! By the way, if somebody happens to know a Python (or whatever) library/example which can do a job similar to what Outline does extracting and tidying pure content from a web page - let me know please. I don't plan any mass-scraping, just want to save some stuff for myself for offline reading.

I've used this wrapper[0] for Firefox's reader mode[1], and it worked well:

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/readability-wrapper

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/readability

I've recently changed a habit of mine where I amass a huge list of bookmarks or files that I'll "read later". I've owned a Kindle for a while now and recently had the idea that I can use the sendtokindle extension to send and store my articles for offline reading. I find it's easier to read the content and my Kindle is usually with me for times I want to read unlike my laptop with all the weight and distractions that come with it.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle

There was some news regarding the use of malariotherapy for Ebola, indicating some promise, from couple of years ago. Did not hear any more about it since then.

paywall

Paywall.

Just clear your site cookies and refresh.

which one lol. My browser says its using 243, just incredible.

Even opening in a clean incognito window hits the paywall

On Firefox I just had to clear the *.wsj.com cookies and then refresh.

Also on firefox, right click "open in new private window" worked... but I don't think it always does. Maybe something to do with my ip address?

Recently some sites are using HTML5 client-side storage for their paywalls, not just cookies. Forget Me for Chrome seems to get them all, though. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/forget-me-clean-hi...

Also. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clear-session/maej...

that doesn't work on wsj.

Worked for me on Firefox. I'm not sure why.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

The paywall issue has been discussed extensively. If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the threads.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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