May was an exciting month for Ebola fans. First, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the unmitigated success of an Ebola vaccine in an animal model. Next steps for this project are trying to determine how to make the immune reaction one that responds to more strains of Ebola.
Then last week, a team of US and Canadian researchers announced a highly successful (again, in an animal model) treatment for Ebola. Read the Reuters article here or catch the NPR story here.
On an ancillary, but interesting note, to coincide with class content on transmission modalities, bush meat anyone? Here is an article about the purported risk of various exotic viruses that could be associated with the apparently thriving bush mean trade. A few points about this article, other than the fact that it’s just interesting:
1) What a creative mode of transmission!
2) Now pause, for a moment, and think about epidemiologically “effective contacts”
3) What is the route of transmission of exotic viruses (hop over to this week’s disease of the week, hemorrhagic fevers, and peruse others), and finally
4) Does human consumption of bush-meat lead to human infection with “HIV-like” viruses, or other from primates (as listed in the noted article, monkey pox, the Ebola virus, yellow fever and tuberculosis).
Thoughts? Opinions? Take this week’s poll at the Question of the Week, and/or feel free to leave a comment here.
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