200 Healthcare Workers Have Died From Ebola. Would You Have Their Courage?

I would not have their courage.

"Ebola has hit doctors and nurses especially hard: More than 200 health care workers have already died from the current Ebola outbreak in Africa. And that’s a reminder that the Americans who initially treated the Texas patient diagnosed with Ebola might be at elevated risk....The longer the Ebola outbreak goes on, the greater the chance that the disease could mutate, too. Scott Gottlieb, who served as a top FDA official under President George W. Bush, has warned that there’s even a chance that Ebola could go airborne....The World Health Organization also warned that given the scale of the outbreak, there’s a possibility that Ebola will go from epidemic to 'endemic' in West Africa." Dan Diamond in Forbes

Background reading: Fact or fiction: Will the Ebola virus go airborne? Probably not. Dina Fine Maron inScientific American.

@Sci_Phile: The science doesn't change just because something is scary. We know how #Ebola reproduces and spreads. We can care for this patient and act.

Good news on the international front: Ebola has been stamped out in Senegal, Nigeria. "he Ebola outbreak may be over in two countries — Nigeria and Senegal — even as it continues to spread rapidly elsewhere in West Africa, U.S. health officials said Tuesday. No new Ebola cases have been diagnosed in Nigeria since Aug. 31, suggesting that the outbreak has been contained, according to a report Tuesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention....Health experts described the spread of Ebola to Lagos, a city of 21 million, as a potential catastrophe. It was also a wake-up call, because it was the first time that an Ebola patient had boarded an airplane and crossed from one country to another." Liz Szabo in USA Today.

Where things stand with treatments. "An experimental antibody cocktail being developed by the U.S. government, the Public Health Agency of Canada and two drug companies, Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. of San Diego and Toronto-based Defyrus Inc. has shown promise in animal tests. Called ZMapp, the drug, produced using tobacco plants, hasn’t been tested in humans, but was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use for two of the infected American health workers who recovered. Safety trials in healthy humans may begin in the first half of next year, according to Defyrus. Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp. also is testing its Ebola therapy, which was given to the third U.S. aid worker who recovered." Makiko Kitamura in Bloomberg.

Ebola researchers discuss a radical idea: Rushing a vaccine into the field. "Dr. Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford, says the urgency of the Ebola situation has led to throwing traditional timelines 'out the window.' He's part of a team of doctors at Oxford University, the National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline who are rushing to create one of several new Ebola vaccines. Hill says their vaccine could be ready to give to health care workers as early as late November. That would be an extremely fast pace compared with the typical timeline for developing a new vaccine." Caitlin Dickerson in NPR.

Rushing drugs and vaccines won't be a panacea, though. "Health officials are gearing up to test drugs and vaccines against Ebola in West Africa, and they hope to start within two months. That's an ambitious timeline for a process that often takes years. The challenge is to move forward as quickly as possible while minimizing the risks that come with unproven drugs and vaccines....Horby is heading a project funded by Britain's Wellcome Trust. He hopes to enroll the first patients by the end of November....Dr. Horby at Oxford says he still believes that public health measures — like finding and isolating people sick with Ebola — will have the biggest impact on stopping the epidemic." Richard Harris in NPR.