Ebola news 8/29

[Buster's Uncle]

Ebola outbreak reaches Senegal, riots break out in Guinea
Reuters
By Diadie Ba and Saliou Samb  47 minutes ago



The Senegalese Ministry of Health said Friday that a man infected with Ebola traveled to Senegal, becoming the first recorded in the country, of an outbreak that has hit four other West African countries and has killed more than 1,500 people. Health Minister Awa Marie Coll Seck told reporters that the infected person is a university student from Guinea who sought treatment at a hospital in Senegal's capital, Dakar, this week. She said the young man said he had had contact with Ebola patients while he was in Guinea, and was immediately put under quarantine.



DAKAR/CONAKRY (Reuters) - The West African state of Senegal became the fifth country to be touched by the world's worst Ebola outbreak on Friday, while riots broke out in neighboring Guinea's remote southeast where infection rates are rising fast.

In the latest sign that the outbreak of the virus, which has already killed at least 1,550 people, is spinning out of control, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that Ebola cases rose last week at the fastest pace since the epidemic began in West Africa in March.

The epidemic has defied efforts by governments to control it, prompting the leading charity fighting the outbreak, Medicins Sans Frontieres, to call for the U.N. Security Council to take charge of efforts to stop it.

Including the fatalities, more than 3,000 have been infected since the virus was detected in the remote jungles of southeastern Guinea in March, and quickly spread across the border to Liberia and Sierra Leone. It has also touched Nigeria where six people have died.

Senegal's first case is a student from Guinea.

Senegalese Health Minister Awa Marie Coll Seck said the man turned up for treatment at a hospital in the capital Dakar on Tuesday, concealing the fact that he had had close contact with victims in his home country. Tests at the Pasteur Institute in Dakar showed he had the disease.

"We are tracing his whole itinerary and also identifying anyone who had contact with the patient, who now that he has been diagnosed is much more cooperative and supplied all the necessary information," the minister said.

A Health Ministry official, who asked not to be named, said that the 21-year-old crossed into Senegal via its southern border with Guinea and had been living in the densely populated Dakar suburb of Parcelles Assainies for three weeks. He added that the man appeared to have a good chance of recovering.



Health workers wearing protective clothing prepare to carry an abandoned dead body presenting with Ebola symptoms at Duwala market in Monrovia August 17, 2014. REUTERS/2Tango


The man had been under surveillance by health authorities in Guinea because of his contact with Ebola victims but escaped to Senegal, Seck said.

Residents in Dakar reacted with anger and concern. "When you are sick, why do you leave your own country to export the disease to another?" asked radio host Taib Soce on RFM, a popular station owned by Senegalese music star Youssou N'dour.

In an attempt to prevent the spread of the virus, Senegal last week banned flights to and from three of the affected countries and shut its land border with Guinea.

The country, a regional hub for U.N. agencies and aid groups, has also refused to give clearance for U.N. aid flights to Ebola-hit countries in a move that humanitarian workers say is hampering their ability to respond to the epidemic.


CATASTROPHE WARNING

The director of the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) warned on Friday of a "catastrophe" if emergency action were not taken immediately to reverse the trend of rising cases.

"There is time to avoid a catastrophe but only if immediate and urgent action is taken at every level," Tom Frieden said in the Sierra Leone capital Freetown.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday that the actual number of Ebola cases could be up to four times higher than reported and said 20,000 people in total could be infected before the outbreak ends.



World Health Organization (WHO) Assistant Director General Bruce Aylward speaks during a press briefing on WHO's strategy to combat Ebola, at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva August 28, 2014. REUTERS/Pierre Albouy


In the remote southeastern Guinean city of Nzerekore, riots broke out on Thursday night over rumors that health workers had infected people with Ebola, a Red Cross official and residents said.

The government of Guinea says it has the epidemic under control, but the number of cases has flared up in southern Guinea, a trend the government blames on people spilling over the borders from Liberia and Sierra Leone.

A crowd of young men, some armed with clubs and knives, set up barricades across Nzerekore on Thursday and threatened to attack the hospital before security forces moved in to restore order. Gunshots were fired and several people were injured, said Youssouf Traore, president of the Guinean Red Cross.

"A rumor, which was totally false, spread that we had sprayed the market in order to transmit the virus to locals," Traore said. "People revolted and resorted to violence, prompting soldiers to intervene."

Local Red Cross workers had to flee to the military camp with their medical equipment. Another resident said the security forces were preventing people leaving their neighborhoods overnight. More than 400 people have died in Guinea, though the infection rate is slower than in Liberia and Sierra Leone.


FINANCIAL SUPPORT

The WHO, on Thursday, unveiled a $490 million road map to bring the outbreak under control over the next nine months.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said it may give more support to affected countries. "We're working on a financing package subject to the approval of the IMF Executive Board to help Liberia along with Guinea and Sierra Leone mitigate any socio-economic impacts of the epidemic," IMF Liberia representative Charles Amo-Yartey said on Friday.

Scientists reported on Friday that in tests the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp had cured all 18 lab monkeys infected with the virus.

In Freetown, a new WHO-backed mobile laboratory opened this week, speeding up the time needed to test suspected cases.

But often financial pledges have not translated into more clinics and staff on the ground, said Jorge Castilla, epidemiologist with the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection Department.

"I've seen many declarations, I see treatment centers on the maps but I know they are not working," he said in an interview after a trip to the affected countries.

Suspicion of healthcare workers has dogged government responses to the Ebola outbreak across West Africa.

Frightened by the sight of healthcare workers clad from head to toe in plastic protective gear and wearing protective masks, many locals have shunned their assistance, often preferring to die in their own homes.

So far, more than 120 healthcare workers have died in the epidemic. Liberia reported five new cases of infection among them in a single day this week.

(Additional reporting by Emma Farge in Dakar, James Giahyue Harding in Monrovia and Umaru Fofana in Freetown; Writing by Emma Farge; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Susan Fenton)


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-outbreak-reaches-senegal-riots-break-guinea-144823238--finance.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Prototype Ebola drug clears early test hurdle
AFP
By Richard Ingham  31 minutes ago



An experimental treatment used to treat two sick American missionaries saved a batch of monkeys infected with Ebola virus, even days after they got sick. What works in monkeys doesn’t always work in humans, but it’s a piece of good news for the makers of ZMapp, a cocktail of engineered antibodies meant to boost the body’s defenses against the virus.



Normally, experimental drugs are tested first on animals and then on progressively larger groups of humans to ensure they are safe and effective.

But, in an exceptional move, a new drug called ZMapp that has not gone through these tests has been rushed to the outbreak in west Africa, as the lethal disease has no cure.

Reporting online in the British journal Nature, researchers at the Public Health Agency of Canada said 18 rhesus macaque monkeys given high doses of Ebola virus fully recovered after being given ZMapp, even when it was administered five days after infection.

It reversed dangerous symptoms such as bleeding, rashes and high levels of enzymes in the liver.

Three "control" monkeys that had been infected, but not treated, all died within eight days.



Health workers, wearing a protective suit, conduct an ebola prevention drill at the port in Monrovia, Liberia on August 29, 2014 (AFP Photo/Dominique Faget)


The 21 animals had been given the so-called Kikwit strain of Ebola, named after a location in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the country where the haemorrhagic fever was discovered in 1976.

But lab-dish tests indicate it can also inhibit the strain in Guinea which has sparked the current epidemic, the scientists said.


- Good first step -

Independent experts hailed the results as an encouraging first step in the long vetting process.

They added, though, it was still unclear whether ZMapp worked on humans, as two patients who have been given it have died and two others have recovered.



An MSF medical worker feeds an Ebola child victim at an MSF facility in Kailahun, Sierra Leone on August 15, 2014 (AFP Photo/Carl De Souza )


"Widespread availability and use of ZMapp will require human safety testing and licensing, coupled with scaleup of the manufacturing process," cautioned David Evans, a professor of virology at Britain's University of Warwick.

A cocktail of three antibodies designed to cling to the Ebola virus and inhibit its reproduction, ZMapp is being developed by Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. of San Diego, California, partly in conjunction with the US Army.

ZMapp has so far been given to seven infected frontline workers.

Of these, two American doctors have recovered; a Liberian doctor and a Spanish priest have died; and a doctor and a nurse, both Liberian, and a British nurse, who has been flown to London from Sierra Leone, are still in treatment.

The World Health Organisation gave the green light on August 12, saying it was ethical to use experimental drugs in the context of this dangerous epidemic.

Stocks of ZMapp, which is derived from tobacco leaves and is hard to produce on a large scale, are exhausted, the company said on August 12.

The other main experimental drug for the disease is TKM-Ebola, being developed by Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp. of Vancouver, Canada, under a $140-million (105-million-euro) contract with the Pentagon.

It is currently in a Phase I human trial, the first step in the three-phase test process. In this phase, a drug is evaluated on healthy non-infected humans to see whether it is safe. Further phases test it for safety and also effectiveness.

More than 1,500 people have died in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone since the disease emerged in West Africa last December.


http://news.yahoo.com/prototype-ebola-drug-clears-early-test-hurdle-191430103.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Gene studies of Ebola in Sierra Leone show virus is mutating fast
Reuters
By Julie Steenhuysen  15 hours ago



CHICAGO (Reuters)- 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 Corp 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.


http://news.yahoo.com/gene-studies-ebola-sierra-leone-show-virus-mutating-103451045.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Ebola Drug 'ZMapp' Saves Infected Monkeys, Study Shows
LiveScience.com
By Bahar Gholipour, Staff Writer  3 hours ago



An employee of the Public Health Agency of Canada works inside of the National Microbiology Laboratory's "level 4" lab, which is designed with safety measure required for working on the most deadly infectious organisms.



An experimental drug called ZMapp, which contains a cocktail of three antibodies that fight the Ebola virus, has successfully treated 18 monkeys infected with the deadly disease, researchers reported today. The new results raise hope that the drug may also work in people who are infected in the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the researchers say.

On the basis of these results in monkeys, several human patients had recently received the latest drug, before the details of the study were published today (Aug. 29) in the journal Nature.

"The success was great," co-author Gary Kobinger, chief of special pathogens at the Public Health Agency of Canada, told reporters at a news conference about the study. "It's an important step forward in the fight against Ebola virus."

In their study, the researchers administered the drug every three days to monkeys infected with Ebola. Some monkeys received the treatment starting on either day three or four after they were infected with the virus, and some even started the treatment on day five, when the animals were only days from reaching the end.

All 18 monkeys in the study recovered from the infection, without showing any lingering effects of the disease, the researchers said.

The drug contains three antibodies, which are molecules that can bind to a foreign protein. Several studies on mice and guinea pigs involving various combinations of six antibodies preceded the new findings, and helped the researchers zero in on the best combination of three antibodies to test on monkeys.

The treatment reversed severe symptoms of the Ebola disease, such as bleeding, rashes and elevated liver enzymes. Three monkeys in the study that did not receive the drug, and served as a control group, died eight days after infection, according to the study.

With the new results, steps may be taken to use the drug in more people, the researchers said. If the drug is further shown to be safe in people, its use could be accelerated under laws allowing for the "compassionate use" of a drug that has not been proven, but may help people who have a disease that has no cure.

However, production of the drug takes time and needs large-scale facilities. The company that has been making limited doses of ZMapp for research doesn't have the capacity to make large quantities of the drug, the researchers said.

Some doses of ZMapp were recently diverted from research purposes to be used in treating four Ebola patients, including two American health care workers who recovered. But it is not possible to know whether the drug had any role in their recovery, experts say. In the current outbreak, about 47 percent of patients have survived.

The drug was also given to a Spanish priest and a Liberian doctor, but they didn't survive. Still, this doesn't mean the drug is not effective, because these two patients appear to have received only one dose, and perhaps too late.

"There is a limit. We know at one point there's a point of no return, where there's too much damage in the major organs to go back, and that's just the reality of it," Kobinger said. There are also other factors that come into play, he added, for example, the age and general health of the patient.

As for the monkeys in the new study, he said, "Our animals are always young adults, they don't have genetic defects or diseases."

But the monkeys in the study did not receive the types of supportive care, such as fluids, that human patients do. Such care helps the body keep the damage from the virus under control.

Currently, the researchers are assembling an intensive-care type of environment to study the effect of combining the drug with supportive care in monkeys, Kobinger said.

The Ebola virus strain used to infect monkeys in the study is not identical to the strain responsible for the current West African outbreak, but the researchers compared the two viruses and found that the sites where the antibody binds to the virus was similar in both. They also tested ZMapp on animals infected with the strain that is circulating in the current outbreak, and the early results have been similarly positive, Kobinger said.

The current Ebola outbreak began in February 2014 in Guinea, and spread to Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. So far, 3,069 suspected and confirmed cases of infection and 1,552 deaths have been reported, according to the World Health Organization.


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-drug-zmapp-saves-infected-monkeys-study-shows-233135518.html