Problem

By Finbarr O'Reilly May. 2, 2016

When she went into labor last November, 18-year-old Kema James climbed onto the back of a motorbike taxi in her village in eastern Sierra Leone and rode half an hour to the main government hospital in the nearby city of Kenema.

When her baby was delivered, he was sickly yellow and stricken with sepsis, an ailment caused by bacteria in the blood, and he hung limply in the hands of the hospital staff. He died five days later before he could be named.

Posted Apr. 19, 2016 at 2:01 AM 

Zika is all over the news. Zika is surely dangerous, but it has its limitations and is likely to be well contained. However, its greater significance extends beyond any current spread. Instead, it exemplifies the crucial emerging trend of a novel infectious agent that has swiftly become a global threat.

April 19, 2016

Results of the Wellcome Trust funded trial of the experimental anti-Ebola drug TKM-130803 have been published today (April 19) in PLOS Medicine. Using a novel approach designed to get rapid indications of a drug's effectiveness, the trial showed that at the dose given the drug did not improve survival compared to historic controls.

TKM-130803 interferes with the production of two essential Ebola virus proteins and has been shown to improve survival when given to monkeys experimentally infected with Ebola virus. Scientists from the University of Oxford and Sierra Leone worked with the humanitarian organisation GOAL Global, the World Health Organisation, and collaborators from a number of other institutions to test whether TKM-130803 could improve survival in adults with Ebola infection.

The researchers used a new approach to generate early evidence of effectiveness or ineffectiveness. This method can be used as a tool to screen potential therapies and determine the need for further studies (including randomised controlled trials) during an epidemic. The approach meant that the study was quickly able to reach a pre-defined point to stop the trial.

Image: A photograph of a mosquito on human skin.

time.com - April 15th 2016 -  Alexandra Sifferlin

One thing that’s especially confounding about Zika is that as soon as something about the virus is understood, it comes under question.

Until recently, experts believed Zika was a relatively benign virus spread by mosquitoes. But now that it’s been linked to more than 1,000 microcephaly cases, scientists have taken a closer look, recently declaring it “scarier than we initially thought,” as one U.S. health official put it this week.

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