Ebola Virus: New Effective Drug Discovered

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by Dafé,

A new report in the May 28 issue of the scientific journal The Lancet, with a team led by Thomas Geisbert of Boston University has used an experimental drug to protect monkeys from death after injecting them with massive doses of the most lethal strain of Ebola.

Geisbert said: “We were stunned. I’ve been working with this virus for my whole career — 23 or 24 years, and we’ve had some mild successes where maybe we could go up to 50 percent protection, But I was really shocked that we got complete protection.” Ebola virus, with a 90 percent mortality rate, is definitely one of the most deadly viruses out there.

Ebola hemorrhagic fever (Ebola HF) is a severe, often-fatal disease in humans and nonhuman primates (monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees) that has appeared sporadically since its initial recognition in 1976.

The disease is caused by infection with Ebola virus, named after a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) in Africa, where it was first recognized. The virus is one of two members of a family of RNA viruses called the Filoviridae. There are five identified subtypes of Ebola virus. Four of the five have caused disease in humans: Ebola-Zaire, Ebola-Sudan, Ebola-Ivory Coast and Ebola-Bundibugyo. The fifth, Ebola-Reston, has caused disease in nonhuman primates, but not in humans.

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