Do today's work today.
Antivirals work. We know it from the lab. We know it from human clinical experience. Incorporating these resources ASAP with African health care is the big problem -- no question about it.
Ebola is not invincible. And it can be fought without waiting for a vaccine.
Where do we begin? Doing an Ebola Update we are struck right off that shockingly little press coverage in America is directed to Africa. What, we have a Lost Continent ??? That is where the action is, not Dallas. Not Lincoln. And what little appears in corporate MSM goes to images of the dead and dying.
The processes underlying this West African epidemic receive no coverage.
For example, the numbers for Ebola infected individuals are now doubling on an estimated 16 day cycle for city slums and 25 days for rural areas. Local sources indicate that Ebola has spread to Mali and Senegal from individuals acquiring Ebola hemorrhagic fever while visiting those countries, plus weaker indications/rumors connected to fresh graves in Benin and northern Nigeria.
The big news -- confirmed yesterday -- is that African response to Ebola is still operating with no organized, supported access to generic antiviral medications. Nothing is being done to enhance Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) services, the local doctors, or the hospitals.
Big Biden Deal: the generic antivirals are not "Experimental Drugs" as described in corporate MSM and various pressers. The only part of it that's experimental is taking a drug that works with hepatitis, flu, HIV and using it with Ebola.
The best known drug is Lamivudine (common commercial name, Epivir.) This was invented in 1988 at McGill University in Montreal. It has been used for severe viral infections ranging from Hepatitis-B to HIV. It is also used for flu outbreaks as in Japan. GlaxoSmithKline ceded production rights to its ViiV Healthcare venture. The drug costs $3 a pill in America (far less overseas) and grosses $500,000,000 a year. It has continuing successfully as a commercial product after the patents expired in 2010/2011.
Lamivudine was approved for humans by the Food and Drug Administration in 1995. Beginning in August, 2014, Dr. Gorbee Logan, the physician at Tubmanburg, Liberia, treated 15 Ebola patients. Of these, 13 started treatment within 5 days of the first symptoms and all of the 13 survived. Unfortunately 2 other patients started treatment later in the cycle and they both died.
This regime for treatment continues today. Similar results. The one and only limit is availability of Lamivudine in West Africa. AIDS clinics have it; others do not and that includes all of the small towns.
You can think of Lamivudine as a generic antiviral. It blocks specific viral-induced DNA replication, but also inhibits RNA replication in certain circumstances. The mechanism suppresses viral replication, hopefully long enough for a human body to generate antibodies.
Here's Tubmanburg, where these tests first succeeded:
-- Contacts in Africa confirm that the Logan approach is being repeated with success though not quite the 100% success rate from Dr. Logan's first effort. Still, plainly, the earlier the generic antiviral is administered, the lower the mortality rate for Ebola patients.
The science for applying a generic antiviral to take on Ebola had already been published. That was in the United States in 2014. We already had live testing of a similar-action drug Favipiravir/T-705 from April, 2014, with aerosol-exposed mice as well as human cell cultures:
Post-exposure efficacy of oral T-705 (Favipiravir) against inhalational Ebola virus infection in a mouse model.-- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...
Smither SJ1, Eastaugh LS2, Steward JA2, Nelson M2, Lenk RP3, Lever MS2.Abstract
Filoviruses cause disease with high case fatality rates and are considered biological threat agents. Licensed post-exposure therapies that can be administered by the oral route are desired for safe and rapid distribution and uptake in the event of exposure or outbreaks. Favipiravir or T-705 has broad antiviral activity and has already undergone phase II and is undergoing phase III clinical trials for influenza. Here we report the first use of T-705 against Ebola virus. T-705 gave 100% protection against aerosol Ebola virus E718 infection; protection was shown in immune-deficient mice after 14 days of twice-daily dosing. T-705 was also shown to inhibit Ebola virus infection in cell culture. T-705 is likely to be licensed for use against influenza in the near future and could also be used with a new indication for filovirus infection.
Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier B.V.
KEYWORDS: Aerosol; Bioterrorism; Broad-spectrum; Ebola; Favipiravir;
It might take all of a week to replicate this aerosol test with Epivir/Lamivudine, assuming a research facility has an interest in such matters.
Africans know already that the drug can work with human Ebola patients. As well, this Favipiravir/T-705 drug has been shown effective with a human Ebola patient in France.
In the United States response to these field events has been led by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH. Their first reaction has been to do test tube work. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director, says that Logan's approach "has merit," though they report that early test results at NAAID were negative. They report not yet trying out the aerosol test.
I feel the need, here, to toss in related experience: relying on "vanilla" test tube work recalls the early days of HIV/AIDS research. Most of the antiviral drugs work best in conjunction with well-functioning liver chemistry. So you have to do aerosol testing (as with these mice in the study) to see where you need to go to get practical results.
U.S. citizens suffered a decade and more of FDA going to court to prevent HIV people from using perfectly good drugs, even Interferon out of Japan.
Instead of ignoring Epivir/Lamivudine and T-705 or going off for months or years of lab work, how's about let's get things done ??? The alternative is giving these patients nothing but antibacterial drugs for secondary infections and the usual physical palliatives.
Revise the Ebola treatment protocol for Africa:
1. Process the intake information for a patient with history and ID work together with triage for the observed stage of disease development.A patient receiving treatment with a generic antiviral drug may well present lower risks to health care workers. Virus replication is suppressed. How effrectively is the question. Get this work in place and the disease should kill fewer doctors and nurses.2. Administer antiviral medication for all likely Ebola patients. Do not wait for tests to come back. Since short-term side effects are relatively minor, the cost-and-benefit value with respect to risk avoidance is maximized with the earliest practical administration of the antiviral. If you treat some number of malaria patients, no foul.
3. Go ahead with the current program of quarantine, standard palliatives, IV treatment, etc.
Reality should drive policy.
-- What's wrong with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases sending people over to Liberia to observe the ongoing practical tests? Or hiring a resource in Liberia to carry out these observations?
-- NIAID has a vaccine out for testing in Mali. They are inoculating doctors and nurses there, which seems odd as Mali has no reported Ebola cases.
It's not that America's NIAID controls the world. It doesn't. Thing is, the United States is sending 3,000 people to Africa and their treatment centers would be perfect for doing Ebola treatment more effectively.
Unfortunately, there is an approach to drugs at NIAID and FDA that gets tied around large-scale pharma economics. Want to think about using an existing drug to treat a new illness? Then start by ponying up $500,000,000 and six to eight years for testing.
Sending people to Liberia has no place in this process model. There is no connection point. Nobody does that type of work as emergency response is not the game plan. As we had to expect, NIAID responded to inquiries, yesterday, saying that there is nothing in their plans that involves direct observation in Africa.
Protecting people from side effects is what they want to talk about. Sounds good. The effort has its virtues. But in the circumstance of defending against Ebola using a 26-year old drug, that's absurd. Not up to the jokes in The Onion.
Epivir/Lamivudine has been around for a long time. Applied now with more than a hundred Ebola patients, it's not a Magic Bullet but it tests far better than the alternative, which is doing nothing much against the virus.
GlaxoSmithKline is the corporate power connected to Epivir/Lamivudine. Contact yesterday with their Corporate, Financial and Global Public Health office led to discussions as to how their task force for Ebola could help. General agreement, what appears obvious, is that antivirals need to be made available ASAP in West Africa.
Epivir/Lamivudine is out of patent protection. $3 a pill. You pay more for Favipiravir/T-705 but Japan has offered up its stock to cover 20,000 patients in West Africa.
Crickets................................
Yes, crickets.
First laboratory identification for this Ebola outbreak came in March, 2014. Médecins Sans Frontières got to the hair-on-fire stage in April. Here we are and it's six months later.
We are approaching mid-October and there is no program in place to supply antivirals to the affected African countries and their medical personnel.
And you thought Ferguson was bad ????? Body lying out in the street... multiply that by thousands.
Does anyone here believe that people would be allowed to die like this in Italy or Canada or Idaho ??? Let the victims be White people, there would have been antiviral meds out there, figuratively in 55-gallon drums on street corners within the week.
Prior to Dr. Logan doing his tests, corporate MSM and the "expert" health organizations made no mention whatsoever of making practical use of the generic antivirals. They didn't forget that it is a virus, right?
As to the major news operations, they can be excused for not putting their people in West Africa. I wouldn't go, myself. No way, no how. Honestly, I'm already a high-mileage model and equatorial Africa challenges our bodies' systems in a thousand ways.
But it remains a surprise that corporate MSM have not developed news items using local residents to tease out descriptions for what is going on.
I also see nothing in corporate MSM concerning Ebola that qualifies as investigative reporting. This has been a Hot Topic since April, but nothing so far. Count this article as an Amateur Hour knock-off.
What will it take to get the medical people in West Africa appropriate supplies of antivirals ???
More below le trump l'orange.......