Israel Creates Global Ebola Blood Registry

Jerusalem, Israel — October 10, 2014 … Private citizens in Israel are now coordinating with the Israeli government to create a global Ebola blood registry.
The Ebola Blood Registry will match Ebola survivors with Ebola victims who share the same blood type.

Matching Ebola survivors with Ebola victims through an effective, global registry open to all respectable health care organizations, may save thousands of lives.

The blood of an Ebola survivor carries antibodies of the virus. By giving a current Ebola patient an injection of a compatible amount of blood plasma from someone who recovered from the disease, those antibodies could help the patient fight the virus.

The World Health Organization has endorsed an old-school remedy that is already abundant in Africa — the blood of people who have survived infection.

Health officials acknowledged that their support for blood transfusions was motivated by emotion as well as by science. Limited quantities of a tested vaccine will not be available until November at the earliest, and stocks of experimental drugs such as ZMapp may not be ready until next year.

“One of the things driving fear and panic in communities is the belief that there is no treatment for Ebola virus disease,” said Marie-Paule Kieny, an assistant director-general at the United Nations’ health agency. “We have to change the sense that there is no hope.”

The concept behind the transfusions is simple: The blood plasma of people who have recovered from Ebola contains antibodies that were successful in fighting off the virus. If these antibodies are pumped into an infected person, they might help the recipient fight the disease as well.

Such transfusions were used to fight illnesses before the advent of antibiotics and vaccines. The German surgeon Emil von Behring first used blood serum to treat diphtheria in 1890 and was awarded a Nobel Prize for his discovery. The technique was expanded to treat many other infectious diseases, such as scarlet fever and measles.

Transfusions were used to treat a small number of patients during the 1995 Kikwit Ebola outbreak in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to Dr. Oyewale Tomori, a professor of virology at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria. A study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases after the outbreak reported that eight patients received transfusions, and only one of them died.

Ebola is spread by contact with the bodily fluids of infected individuals. Once in the bloodstream, the virus enters cells and begins to replicate itself, damaging blood vessels and organs in the process. Symptoms begin to appear two to 21 days after infection and include fever, diarrhea, vomiting, aches and bleeding. In the current outbreak, the odds of survival are slightly below 50%.

Israel, whose researchers are performing ground breaking work in the fight against Ebola fever that is now spreading in Western Africa, Europe and North America will send three mobile emergency clinics to Africa.

The Israel Foreign Ministry’s Mashav department, which is the Agency for International Development Cooperation, has decided to increase Israel’s contribution to the international effort to prevent the spread of the epidemic.

An Israeli team has already been sent to Cameroon, where it was favorably received by the local authorities.

The Israel ministry sent emergency equipment to the government of Sierra Leone, and in recent weeks, it shipped personal protection equipment to teams of the African Union.

Asked to comment, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Ebola researcher Dr. Leslie Lobel said: “This is great news. Finally, Israel is joining the righteous and helping out with Ebola.”

The US-born researcher has for the last 12 years devoted himself to the study of viral diseases at BGU’s Health Sciences Faculty. Born in Queens, New York he has an MD and doctorate in virology from Columbia University and studied the human immune response to cancer and developed human monoclonal antibodies.

He and his lab team in the faculty’s microbiology, immunology and genetics department, isolate and produce molecules in the lab that are naturally produced by the immune system in survivors, and they attach to the Ebola virus to inhibit infection. These are the antibodies that the body produces naturally as part of the immune system’s response to the pathogens.

Lobel travels to Uganda five times a year and is one of the first to follow up Ebola fever survivors. A team from the US military, he said, has joined him “along with wonderful collaborators in Uganda.”

The volunteers who created EbolaBloodRegistry.org are seeking to cooperate with all respected, professional global health care organizations and are currently speaking with investors to create a global awareness campaign.

Well, Israel’s response combined with what’s below ought to get things moving in the right direction on this issue:

MEMORANDUM

TO: Vladimir Putin, President, the Russian Republic
FROM: Sane people everywhere
DATE: As soon as you read this
RE: The spread of Ebola

FACTS:

1. Ebola is a communicable disease that, in its current variant, is fatal approximately 70% of the time, and causes immense suffering.

2. There is no cure (or at least none available to more than a few dozen people), and no vaccine. Additionally, the disease mutates very rapidly, so even if scientists are able to develop a cure or a vaccine, the disease may by then have already mutated to a more easily communicable form. Actually, the more people who are infected, the greater chance of such a mutation.

3. Additionally, the more people that are infected outside of West Africa, the greater chance that a second or third “natural reservoir” of the disease will become established, making it virtually impossible to control future outbreaks.

4. People from the 3 nations where this nascent pandemic originated are traveling to various places around the globe, and cases have occurred in a variety of places around the world including the United States and Europe.

5. The President of the United States, Barack Obama, has repeatedly refused to take any action to stop people who may be infected with Ebola from traveling via air.

ISSUE:

What can be done to stop the spread of this disease before it becomes incapable of being managed?

ANALYSIS:

1. Since the disease is effectively incurable, and since there is no vaccine, the best hope of minimizing the harm created by this disease and minimizing the chance that it will become a pandemic that could literally kill half or more of the human race, lies in containing the disease to its points of origin in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

2. Since President Obama is, apparently, unwilling to do anything of substance to halt air traffic originating from the host nations of this Ebola outbreak, something else must be done by some other nation that is capable of effectively stopping the above-mentioned air travel.

3. The Russian Republic is a nation of vast resources, including vast military resources.

4. You are in charge of the armed forces of the Russian Republic.

CONCLUSION/RECCOMENDATION:

1. Since Ebola is a communicable, highly-lethal and effectively incurable disease, the spread of this disease must be stopped as soon as is practical in order to spare the world a pandemic that could literally kill hundreds of millions or billions of people.

2. Since the United States has abdicated responsibility or initiative in attempting to accomplish the halt of the spread of this disease, some other nation must do so to avoid an unspeakable tragedy.

3. Since the Russian Republic possesses enormous military resources, and since you are in charge of those resources, and since you have displayed tremendous decisiveness over the years of your leadership, it is the conclusion of all sane people everywhere that you may be our only hope. Therefore, and with great humility and respect, we hereby ask you to order the armed forces of the Russian Republic to destroy every airport in the nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, and to do so without delay.

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