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The Ebola Wars

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Re: The Ebola Wars

#41

Post by cloakandswagger »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #37
dnautics wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's even more fascinating. (biochemist here) I think the immunosuppressive regions is a small protein called sGP which ebola causes the cell to produce a ton of. It's not attached to ebola virions, so in a way it's a DDOS on the immune system, by creating a foreign component that the immune system gets distracted by instead of going after ebola.

> a small protein called sGP which ebola causes the cell to produce a ton of Is that why people die? Cells make too much of that stuff?

Correct. Victims bodies are tricked into generating large amounts of cells. This causes the hemorrhaging which is the ultimate cause of death.

Fun fact: The victim's body continues producing cells for several hours after death. In rare cases this (in conjunction with post-death bloating) causes the cadaver to "explode"

Re: The Ebola Wars

#42

Post by JoeAltmaier »

ghkbrew wrote: post #36
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for saying that! Its so often repeated that our DNA contains the entire program for a human being. That's patently false. The cellular machinery provides almost all of the OS; DNA is just a script. I liken DNA to a paper tape containing one of two punches: MAN or MOUSE. Feed it into a bio-replicator and get a man or a mouse. Does the paper tape define the man? Of course not.

> I liken DNA to a paper tape containing one of two punches: MAN or MOUSE I don't think that really captures it. Yes, it requires external machinery to actually do anything, but DNA is much more information dense and carries much more of an exact definition of the organism to be produced. Personally, I prefer the analogy of compiler source code. Sure, it can't do anything on its own. But it defines how an working ext…

Yet the dynamic biochemistry of the cell is orders of magnitude larger and more complex than DNA. So its larger than a paper tape, sure, but the comparison is pretty good really.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#43

Post by suprgeek »

The description of the conditions in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone and the over-whelming odds that the doctors there are facing was heartbreaking to read.

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is as much a function of poverty as it is of the Ebola Virus. One of these all of us can fight.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#44

Post by kevinskii »

astrange wrote: post #32

What I get from this article is that they let the most important candidate for the drug die without taking it, but then two random Americans got it because no one was watching. Is the lesson here to always steal people's vaccines without asking?

This is a good point. A dose of ZMapp was being stored on the very same premises where Dr. Khan lay dying. But instead of giving him the treatment on the spot, considerable risk was instead taken to deliver it to two Americans in another country 250 miles away.

However it would be unfair to say that this was because the Americans' lives were valued more than Dr. Khan's. He was being cared for by Doctors Without Borders. For quite rational reasons they decided to withhold the treatment [1]. The Americans were under someone else's care and thus weren't subject to DWB's decision.

My main ethical disagreement is with DWB's decision not to inform Dr. Khan of ZMapp's existence while knowing that it would be used by others.

[1] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&obje...

Re: The Ebola Wars

#45

Post by rwallace »

tedks wrote: post #40
throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

38 kilobits = 4.7 kB, but yes. Here's the complete genome of the pandemic strain (scroll down a bit): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KJ660346 Here's the paper sequencing it. ([edit]: I just realized the New Yorker article is largely about this exact paper -- I commented before reading, sorry). Note that five of the authors died before publication; there's a short tribute accompanying it. http://www.sciencemag.or…

...did nobody stop and think "maybe we shouldn't put the source code for a massively lethal virus on the Internet" before uploading that to GitHub?

In fairness, as things now stand, any nutcase who wanted to obtain Ebola with evil intent could do it more easily by hopping on a plane to West Africa than by reconstituting it from its genome. The threat is from the natural epidemic currently running wild, and making all relevant information freely available might help the search for cures and vaccines.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#46

Post by omarelamri »

jerf wrote: post #18
FD3SA wrote: post #10

Good thing we've been cutting science funding across the board! Doubt the NIH and NSF grants were helping science much anyway. As a matter of fact, science should be privately funded and privately run. What idiot thought it was a good idea to make scientific research a government mandate? To thy weary, I say: The market shall provide. P.S. Yes, I am bitter about the current state of science. I've written about it in…

The CDC was and is plenty funded to deal with this threat. If you think they didn't spend it well, well, join the club. No amount of money is ever "enough" if it not managed responsibly. I'd really appreciate it if those who think the answer is always more government money would start putting more pressure on their goverment to spend it responsibly . I mean that quite straight, not as a snark. It would go a long way…

They're spending the money on cute Ebola-fighting robots: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/medical-robots/r...

Re: The Ebola Wars

#47

Post by hga »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #38
jerf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then my point is even more important given the proportion of it actually spent on infectious diseases. If that's so allfired important than why were they doing anything else with that money? The answer, of course, is that it wasn't considered so important until a couple of months ago, and thus, it wouldn't matter how much money was thrown at them, it wouldn't have solved the fundamental priority problem. Contra to so…

I am not trying to be difficult, but I don't understand your point. Ebola is a vanishingly unimportant concern as far as infectious diseases go. This current "outbreak" has resulted in 2 transmissions in the US to date. The reason it appears that the system failed is that the system correctly reacted to a low value threat, but it was amplified into a hysteria because of dynamics in media economics and US political cy…

OK, I'll down vote you and explain why: your studied inability or unwillingness to do math, to whit, what a disease like Ebola can do in a 3rd World urban environment (or village/small town ones different than the former locations of outbreaks), specifically double the number of infections approximately every 3 weeks.

Right now this Ebola outbreak gives every sign of having the potential to be the most significant public health event in a number of centuries. Like, maybe we'll end up having to go back to the 1346–1350 Black Death for comparison, unless we can develop, test, produce and distribute a vaccine very quickly.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#49

Post by throwaway5752 »

suprgeek wrote: post #43

The description of the conditions in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone and the over-whelming odds that the doctors there are facing was heartbreaking to read. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is as much a function of poverty as it is of the Ebola Virus. One of these all of us can fight.

I am profoundly moved by the heroism Dr Khan and his nurses showed and the example they've set for future generations of medical professionals. I hope it's publicized when Dr. Khan's family finishes setting up the foundation in his name

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

Re: The Ebola Wars

#50

Post by kazinator »

> A particle of Ebola is made of only six structural proteins, locked together to become an object that resembles a strand of cooked spaghetti. An Ebola particle is only around eighty nanometres wide and a thousand nanometres long. If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree.

So, 0.08 microns wide, 1 micron long, but ... nope, not air-borne! You have nothing to worry about, folks!

You know, pollen is air-borne, and pollen grains start at around 10 microns: ten times the length of a stick of ebola.

> The virus is extremely infectious. Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person’s bloodstream it can cause a fatal infection. [ ... ] One common route of entry is thought to be the wet membrane on the inner surface of the eyelid, which a person might touch with a contaminated fingertip.

Nope, an infection via the eyelid membrane couldn't conceivably happen via the airborne route. Lalala, fingers in my ears ...

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