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To: Innovative

“And apparently there is some vaccine which hasn’t been fully explored, but exist, that’s what they gave to the doctor they brought to the US from Africa, and they say he is improving.”

A vaccine is useless in a patient with the virus. A vaccine elicits an immune response thus protecting an individual against an infection. Someone infected with Ebola is already eliciting the required immune response in an attempt to live. Vaccines are only useful prior to infection.

What is useful is immune globulin from an individuale that had ebola and survived. His blood is full of antibodies that will attack the ebola virus until the patients own immune system can elicit a response and produce its own antibodies.

The patients that have survived ebola have done so by supportive care to avoid end stage organ failure. If you can live long enough your own body will produce the antibodies to defeat the disease. In essence if you survive a few weeks your own body will defeat the disease. Unfortunately depending on the strain, most do not survive long enough for an immune response to kill the disease. The game is how quick can you produce the immune response and the antibodies.

Ebola is a strange disease. A disease with this extreme lethality should be self limiting as your vectors for transmission die quickly and thus the spread. This leads one to believe there is a host vector that it does not kill. There is some animal species that has the virus but is not killed by it. It may not be just one species.

This may get ugly.


24 posted on 08/03/2014 8:43:23 PM PDT by cpdiii (deckhand, roughneck, geologist, pilot, pharmacist. The constitution is worth dying for!)
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To: cpdiii

Depending on how it mutates, yeah, it could go through us like the Black Death. Unlikely in this country but it could happen..


25 posted on 08/03/2014 8:50:48 PM PDT by tumblindice (America's founding fathers: all armed conservatives.)
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