Tracking the deadly ebola outbreak in West Africa

The recent Ebola epidemic brought doctors and scientists from all corners of the world to West Africa, as aid groups and government rushed to stop the deadly spread of the disease. Now, that flood of resources is producing technology that could have implications far beyond just Ebola. A paper published today in Nature details a new system for analyzing genetic samples in the field, a tool that provided crucial data for tracking Ebola last year and could prove even more powerful in tracking future epidemics.

The instruments fit into three airline-ready bags, weighing less than 50 kilograms together, which allowed scientists to take them to remote clinics on the front lines of the outbreak. Between March and October of 2015, the team collected 142 different Ebola samples, typically returning a result in two working days, with longer delays if the researchers struggled with power outages or connectivity problems. Those samples provided valuable information as to how the disease was traveling on the border between Guinea and Sierra Leone.

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa is far from over. Without a reliable drug or vaccine, new infections continue to surface in countries like Guinea and Sierra Leone. To fully squash the epidemic, some researchers want to overhaul current medical interventions in West Africa, as well as the way scientists conduct research in future outbreaks. The lessons researchers have learned in the last few months can be applied now, they say; they're the key to ending the current epidemic.

A vaccine is "highly effective" against Ebola, according to the World Health Organization. Early results from a trial in Guinea show that the drug protected 100 percent of the people who received it against Ebola. If the trial's results continue to show this level of promise, the vaccine could help end the outbreak in West Africa.

People infected with Ebola might one day find themselves treating the virus with drugs originally intended to tackle depression and heart disease. By screening more than 2,500 existing drugs, scientists have identified 30 FDA-approved drugs that appeared to kill the Ebola virus in cultured cells. Among then, the antidepressant Zoloft and heart disease drug Vascor were able to stop the virus from reproducing in rodents as well. The findings, published today in Science Translation Medicine, are tentative but also encouraging. Developing new drugs takes a lot of time and money, and repurposing old ones that are already approved by the FDA could really speed things up.

To find out if existing drugs could be used against Ebola, Olinger and his team of researchers screened thousands of drugs against cells that had been infected with Ebola. Out of the lot, 30 drugs were able to kill the Ebola virus in a cell culture. But two drugs, drugs known as Zoloft and Vascor, were the most promising. They block the virus's ability to enter, replicate in, and exit infected cells. To further investigate the two drugs, researchers tested them in rodents. Both were able to protect mice from Ebola. About 70 percent of mice treated with Zoloft survived, whereas all the mice that were given Vascor survived.

Chinese scientists report that the Ebola virus responsible for the outbreak in West Africa last year mutated at a normal rate, further alleviating fears that the virus had been able to evolve more rapidly than usual thanks to the prolonged and widespread nature of the epidemic. Ebola, like HIV and influenza, belongs to a class of virus with a high rate of mutation, and scientists had previously warned that it might evolve to become more contagious and, in an extreme scenario, even airborne.

This latest report published in Nature corroborates an earlier study from March, showing that while the virus did mutate as it spread to new areas, it did so within the bounds of expected behavior. Early analyses had suggested that the virus might be evolving at twice the usual rate. The new findings, however, don't make the outbreak itself any less serious — the Nature report states that more than 10,000 individuals are thought to have been killed by the virus, while an additional 25,000 have been infected.

An experimental Ebola drug kept monkeys from dying when it was administered to them 72 hours after infection. The finding bodes well for a human drug trial that’s already underway in Sierra Leone — a country were nine cases of Ebola were reported just last week.

Another Ebola vaccine is making its way through human trials with promising results. The vaccine was well tolerated by healthy volunteers in an early safety trial, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine today.

Since the beginning of the current outbreak, Ebola has infected over 25,000 people and claimed the lives of 10,000 people, most of whom reside in West Africa. Ebola isn't air borne; transmission can be controlled through routine hand-washing and by using barriers to prevent contact with infectious bodily fluids. Still, doctors don't have a cure for Ebola and the death toll continues to rise. This is why scientists are actively searching for a way to protect people who live in regions where the virus is present.

Ebola itself was bad enough in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia. But the outbreak also led to turmoil in those countries' health care systems — and now a measles outbreak is a risk. Should a measles outbreak occur, almost twice as many people will be sickened, compared with before the outbreak. Thousands could die, according to a study appearing in the journal Science today.

"Measles in particular is known to show up during or after humanitarian crises because it’s so infectious," says Justin Lessler, a study lead author and an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in a call with reporters.

We’re finally starting to understand how Ebola infects living organisms, which means we’re getting closer to finding a way to stop it. The virus enters and infects cells thanks to channels in the cell’s membrane, according to a study published in Science today — and a molecule found in an Asian herb appears to be able to stop that process in mice.

The World Health Organization has approved the first rapid test for detecting Ebola, providing health workers with a way to quickly identify patients who have been infected with the virus, reports The Guardian. The test returns results in 15 minutes and is planned for use in West Africa, where the Ebola epidemic continues even as new infections begin to taper. That quick turnaround is a dramatic change from current testing, which reportedly requires around four to six hours in a lab, but is often held up for days because of delays while transporting samples.

The test is known as the ReEBOV Antigen rapid test and is made by Corgenix, a medical company in the US. Corgenix's test is said to be able to correctly identify 92 percent of patients with Ebola and 85 percent of patients without it. That's less accurate than a lab test, but it'll allow health workers to keep healthy patients or patients with other illnesses out of clinics that are treating Ebola, preventing the virus from spreading further. Since the outbreak began, there have been over 23,000 reported cases of Ebola in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, with deaths now reaching over 9,300.

The international response to the Ebola crisis was more generous than most health policy experts predicted, but the actual deployment of those resources has been extremely slow, according to an analysis of Ebola donations published today in the British Medical Journal. So far, only 40 percent of Ebola donation pledges have been paid out, and according to the author of the study, the delayed response from international health agencies might be to blame.

"The WHO and others didn’t ask for money soon enough," says Karen Grépin, a global health policy researcher at New York University and the author of the study. "There’s no doubt in my mind that the delay between the time when the WHO learned about the outbreak and the time when the WHO and others called for donations was really too long." The WHO failed to respond to The Verge's requests for comment.

An Ebola vaccine produced using a chimpanzee common cold virus appears to be safe to use on humans, according to a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Three different doses of vaccine were tested on healthy humans in the UK, and it was well-tolerated; it triggered high levels of antibody formation without also triggering serious side effects. But until the vaccine is tested in an area where an Ebola risk actually exists, it’s efficacy against the disease will remain a mystery.

As many as 12 scientists may have been exposed to Ebola earlier this week in a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab in Atlanta, The Washington Post reports. On Monday, scientists who were researching the disease accidentally put a sample containing the Ebola virus in a place where it was transferred to another lab on the CDC's Atlanta campus.

A person answering the media line at the CDC, who declined to be named, also declined to comment on the report.

Though the world has made progress in ending the Ebola epidemic, reports from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone suggest the fight against Ebola isn't over, according to correspondence from the World Health Organization published online today by The New England Journal of Medicine. Fewer people are being infected, but successes against the disease have been unevenly distributed, and the outbreak isn't under control.

Merck & Co. and NewLink Genetics stopped their early-stage Ebola vaccine trial after only a week, after four of 59 volunteers said they had pains in their hands and feet, according to a report from The Financial Times.

The study was the first of three phases of clinical trials typically required for regulatory approval. The trial may restart in January, if the joint pains patients experienced are "benign and temporary," The Financial Times said. Merck bought the vaccine last month for as much as $50 million from NewLink; it's one of several attempts to create a vaccine for the disease.

Three clinical trial volunteers sit next to Kirsten Lyke, a tropical disease researcher, as she discusses her work on the phone. All had come to the University of Maryland, in Baltimore, to receive a dose of an experimental Ebola vaccine. "We’re finishing up our last set of vaccinations today," she says. And "right around the new year, we will have the new data."

Craig Spencer, the 33-year-old doctor whose positive test for Ebola made New York unusually panicky, is set to check out of Bellevue Hospital tomorrow, the New York Times reports. Spencer was taken to the hospital by ambulance on October 23 after he reported a fever that morning.

Spencer had been in Guinea, which has had 1,760 confirmed cases and at least 1,054 deaths as of November 4, according to the CDC. He was with Doctors Without Borders, an international aid organization. After receiving every available treatment — including an experimental drug and donated plasma from another Ebola patient — over the course of the last 19 days, he is now well enough to leave the hospital. It's not clear whether he will return to his apartment, where his fiance is quarantined, the New York Times says.

Following the example of its founder Mark Zuckerberg — who recently donated $25 million to help fight the spread of the Ebola virus — Facebook is today announcing three new initiatives in support of those affected by Ebola. First and most significant is the addition of a new donation notification, which will appear at the top of every Facebook user's News Feed over the next week. It'll be a simple message with an option to directly contribute to the funds of one of three non-profit organizations working in West Africa at the moment: the Red Cross, International Medical Corps, and Save the Children. You can use PayPal or a Visa or MasterCard to complete the payment.

Facebook will also push awareness-raising UNICEF messages to the News Feeds of people in the West African countries most affected by Ebola. These will contain basic information about the typical symptoms of the disease and direct those suspecting they might be infected to go to the nearest health facility. Finally, Facebook is donating 100 mobile satellite communication terminals, which will be deployed in the most remote and infrastructure-deprived areas of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone to provide voice and data services where they are most lacking.

Today, Louisiana state health officials told anyone who has traveled to an Ebola-affected country within the last 21 days — or treated Ebola patients elsewhere — not to come to the annual meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

The group, founded in 1903, is an organization of scientists, doctors, and others who aim to control infectious diseases that mainly affect the poorest people in the world. Like, for instance, Ebola. Their meeting will begin on Nov. 2 in New Orleans, and the group doesn't know how many scientists will be affected, incoming president Christopher Plowe told Science. Some who will be affected were planning to come from the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he says.

Millions of doses of a candidate Ebola vaccine are expected to be available next year, with efficacy trials beginning in certain West African countries this December, the World Health Organization said this morning. There are currently two candidate vaccines for Ebola that are ready to begin human trials, and five others are expected to get started during the first several months of next year. The vaccines must be determined to be safe and effective before a mass vaccination begins, however. The WHO says that there are no plans to begin a mass vaccination program until at least June 2015, and then only if the growth of the epidemic justifies it.

The WHO cautioned that even a working vaccine would not be a "magic bullet" for stopping the spread of Ebola, according to the BBC. Rather, the WHO says that the vaccine could be a "very important tool" should the current response not be enough. "And even if the epidemic would be already receding by the time we have vaccine available, the modeling seems to say vaccine may still have an impact on controlling the epidemic," WHO assistant director-general Marie-Paule Kieny says, according to the BBC. The WHO says that by the end of the first half of 2015, a few hundred thousand doses of candidate vaccine will be available.

New York City has its first confirmed case of Ebola in a doctor who had recently been traveling in West Africa to treat patients suffering from the deadly disease. Craig Spencer, 33, was taken to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan earlier today after experiencing a 103 degree fever and other symptoms, reports The New York Times. An initial test has since confirmed that Spencer contracted the disease, which has killed 4,877 people and infected nearly 10,000 across Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Spencer's now in isolation, though was reportedly bowling and taking Uber for transportation on Wednesday night, raising questions about whether others may have been in close contact.

In a statement, Bellevue Hospital said it "designated for the isolation, identification and treatment of potential Ebola patients by the City and State," and that New York City was taking "all necessary precautions" to keep others from getting the disease.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen will contribute "at least" $100 million to fight the spread of Ebola, he announced Thursday. In a tweet, Allen revealed the new donation amount and urged others to make their own contributions — big or small. "Everybody feels called sometimes to really pursue a certain thing that resonates with them, and this has resonated with me," Allen told The New York Times. "We’re up against an extremely tough opponent here. The exponential nature of the growth of this disease is really a challenge — we’ve already seen in the U.S. where one case quickly became two."

Imposing travel bans that prevent people from Ebola-stricken countries from leaving those countries would be "irrational," said Elhadj As Sy, Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, during a press conference earlier today. The measure — one that would be borne out of fear and panic — simply wouldn’t curb Ebola infections.