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Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat

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Re: Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat

#21
post #16

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.

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

[deleted]

Re: Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat

#22
post #16

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.

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

Re: Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat

#23
post #16

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.

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

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

Re: Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat

#24
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat

#25
post #16

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.

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

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

Re: Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat

#26
post #22
post #16

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.

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

Re: Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat

#28

https://outline.com/zXFSvv

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.

Re: Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat

#29
post #16

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.

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

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

Re: Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat

#30

https://outline.com/zXFSvv

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

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