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Ebola Vaccine Would Likely Have Been Found By Now If Not For Budget Cuts: NIH Director

HUFFINGTON POST

By Sam Stein                                                              Updated Oct. 13 ,2014

BETHESDA, Md. -- As the federal government frantically works to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and as it responds to a second diagnosis of the disease at home, one of the country's top health officials says a vaccine likely would have already been discovered were it not for budget cuts.

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has "slowed down" research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.

"NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and thought, 'Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'" Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."

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Les petits fabricants de médicaments ne peut évoluer assez rapidement pour devancer le virus

deux vues d'ensemble des efforts déployés par les fabricants de drogues pour produire des médicaments de l'Ebola.

WASHINGTON POST le 10 octobre, 014

par Lenny Bernstein et Brady Dennis

WASHINGTON... "il faut du temps. Vous vous retrouvez avec une situation où les entreprises n'ont pas été mis en place pour augmenter leurs productio. Vous n'allez juste de que de faire 10 000 du jour au lendemain."--Prof. Thomas Galsbert, University of Texas Medical Branch à Galveston.

Lire l'article complet

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/small-drugmakers-try-to-scale-up-to-meet-ebola-crisis/2014/10/09/a594dec2-4fee-11e4-babe-e91da079cb8a_story.html

sciences INSIDER 8 octobre 2014

par Jon Cohen et Kai Kupferschmidt

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La FDA approuve l'utilisation du médicament expérimental de virus Ebola

La colline 6 octobre 2014
par Sarah Ferris

Washington--la Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lundi a approuvé l'utilisation d'un médicament expérimental qui a été saluée comme l'une des meilleures chances de l'industrie pharmaceutique à lutter contre le virus Ebola.

Chimerix, une société biopharmaceutique axée sur la Caroline du Nord, a annoncé lundi qu'il a reçu l'approbation pour administrer un médicament antiviral appelé brincidofovir qui a traité avec succès le virus d'Ebola dans les tests en laboratoire.

La drogue a également été testée par les Centers for Disease Control and Prevention et le National Institutes of Health, bien qu'il ne devrait pas obtenir l'approbation pour un usage grand public jusqu'à fin 2016.

une autre drogue qui a été utilisée pour traiter les patients infectés par le virus Ebola, TKM-Ebola, a également été autorisée pour une utilisation d'urgence par la FDA... Le médicament, produit par la Canadian drugmaker Tekmira, a reçu une désignation de « fast track » et est encore en cours des essais cliniques.

voir article entier

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/219856-fda-approves-use-of-experimental-ebola-drug

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Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF

Rubbish dumped on the tundra outside llulissat in Greenland stand in stark contrast to icebergs behind from the Sermeq Kujullaq or llulissat Ice fjord – a Unesco world heritage site. Photograph: Global Warming Images/WWF-Canon Image:  Rubbish dumped on the tundra outside llulissat in Greenland stand in stark contrast to icebergs behind from the Sermeq Kujullaq or llulissat Ice fjord – a Unesco world heritage site. Photograph: Global Warming Images/WWF-Canon

theguardian.com - September 29th, 2014 - Damian Carrington

The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years, according to a new analysis. Creatures across land, rivers and the seas are being decimated as humans kill them for food in unsustainable numbers, while polluting or destroying their habitats, the research by scientists at WWF and the Zoological Society of London found.

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Why We Won't Have An Ebola Cure Or Vaccine For Years

UPDATE with comments from interviw with CDC Director Tom Frieden.   Scroll below.

 

huffingtonpost.com - October 2nd, 2014 - Jeffery Young

The world has known about Ebola for almost 40 years, yet there's no cure or vaccine on the market.

That could change amid worldwide attention to the ongoing outbreak of the virus in West Africa, which has claimed more than 3,000 lives already, and the first diagnosis of a patient with the disease in the United States. But not for a few more years -- at least.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

 

Update: Comments by CDC Director on Sunday TV interview

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/cdc-director-tom-frieden-ebola-drug-pipeline-will-be-slow-n218666


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How a Winnipeg lab became an Ebola research powerhouse

Researchers with the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg say they are optimistic that a tool to combat the Ebola virus may be on the horizon. (John Woods/Canadian Press) By Helen Branswell - The Canadian Press - Sep 21, 2014

Winnipeg is half a world away from the countries in Africa where Ebola, and its viral cousin, Marburg, occasionally slip out of their animal reservoir to start infecting and killing people, as Ebola is now doing in West Africa.

The current outbreak has infected at least 5,335 people and killed at least 2,622. To date, there has never been a case of either viral hemorrhagic fever infections within Canadian borders.

So why then is Canada's national lab an Ebola research powerhouse? Why is a facility on the edge of the Prairies, near North America's longitudinal centre, the site from whence some of the most promising Ebola research emanates?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/how-a-winnipeg-lab-became-an-ebola-research-powerhouse-1.2773397

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Doctor Recovering From Ebola Got Experimental Tekmira Drug

 

nbcnews.com

A medical missionary recovering from Ebola infection in Nebraska was given an experimental drug made by a Canadian company, his doctors said Monday. They’d already said that Dr. Rick Sacra got transfusions of serum from recovered Ebola patient Dr. Kent Brantly. They also had revealed that he got a weeklong treatment course of an experimental drug but had not said what drug it was.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/doctor-recovering-ebola-got-experimental-tekmira-drug-n209191

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Overview of U.S.Defense Department activities against Ebola, including testing vaccine candidate

By Cheryl Pellerin

DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26, 2014 – The Defense Department has made critical contributions to the fight against the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and today Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel described additional ways the Pentagon is helping in the broader battle against infectious disease outbreaks of the future.

He spoke at a gathering of top government and military officials and infectious disease experts from 44 countries here to attend the Global Health Security Agenda, or GHSA, Summit hosted by President Barack Obama.

Hagel said ...the department also is accelerating the manufacture of potential treatments and starting clinical trials for a vaccine candidate and it has received approval to begin safety testing for one [Ebola] vaccine candidate that will be conducted at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.”

...The DoD Cooperative Threat Reduction Program is providing unique resources and expertise to enhance detection and surveillance, Hagel said, and all department assets will help civilian responders contain Ebola's spread and mitigate its economic, social and political fallout.

For fuller description of the Defense Department's activities to counter Ebola see link to the full article:

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Doctor in Liberia reports some success in treating Ebola with an HIV drug

The Washington Post Follow-up to the original CNN report        Oct. 2, 2014

Since the original CNN interview, Logan has been in contact with Dr. Fauci. "I can't say it's a good idea or bad idea," Fauci told The Post this week. "It's one of those things where you're in a situation where you have no therapy, so you look for things that might be available."

Fauci said National Institutes of Health researchers have tested lamivudine's reaction to Ebola in test tubes. There was no response; but Fauci said researchers will adjust some levels and try it again "to see if there's even slight activity against Ebola."

If there is, he said, NIH would consider going to the trial stage.

It makes sense to consider lamivudine as a potential Ebola treatment: It belongs to a group of drugs known as nucleoside analogs, which interfere with the replication processes of certain viruses, Fauci explained.

See Washington Post report

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/10/02/a-liberian-doctor-is-using-hiv-drugs-to-treat-ebola-victims-the-nih-is-intrigued/

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Ebola: an open letter to European governments

 
 
The Lancet, Early Online Publication, 26 September 2014

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