Medicine & TechnologySurprisingly, a cure for the most hazardous, epidemic, and deadly viral infection is found in horses. Virologist has found that antibodies from horses are a potential treatment platform for Ebola Virus.
A teenager from Connecticut won the first prize of the 2015 Google Science Fair where she invented an express kit designed to detect the deadly Ebola virus in less than half an hour.
A woman from Ohio recently arrived from an Ebola-affected country reported Ebola-like symptoms and is now under observation at the Ohio Health Grant in Columbus.
Dr. Ian Crozier fought Ebola for his life for an extended period of time at Emory University Hospital until, in October, the lengthy, bloody battle seemed to have ended with him the victor. But not even two months later searing pressure and pain in his left eye and failing sight landed him back in the hospital. His terrifying discovery? The Ebola virus was thriving inside his eye.
A year later and over 4,000 dead, Liberia can finally breathe a sigh of relief as The World Health Organization (WHO) declares the country Ebola free.
"The outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia is over," according to a WHO statement given at the emergency command center in Monrovia, as reported by The New York Times.
But this doesn't mean Africa is in the clear. In fact, if the countries surrounding Liberia are included, the death toll from the past year's outbreak soars to more than 11,000, making the current outbreak five times deadlier that all previous outbreaks combined.
Ten months ago the perfect storm of weak public health policy, poverty, and the Ebola virus transformed Liberia into a bloody battleground. The epicenter of the disaster was the Logan Town clinic, where workers without gloves or running water tried by candlelight to try to save their first patient in the crisis. Now, less than a year later, the Logan Town Clinic and its employees—like the rest of Liberia—is equipped to handle Ebola and any similar disease epidemic.
Gary W. Procop, MD, a fellow of the College of American Pathologists (FCAP), wants the public to better understand the benefits of herd immunity-and to realize that they will not work if too many people refuse to vaccinate.
U.S. health officials now say that the Ebola virus can be transmitted when survivors of the disease have unprotected sex and could even occur many months after being declared free of the virus.
Health officials have begun warning survivors of the Ebola virus against having unprotected sex after the virus was found in a male survivor's semen 175 days after he first developed symptoms of the virus, which it noted was 74 days longer than it has been found in other survivors.
Researchers have high hopes for the latest version of the ebola vaccine. Responses from patients seem to indicate this might be the answer the world has been hoping for.
Exactly one year ago today, on March 23, 2014, the World Health Organization announced there was an Ebola outbreak in Guinea. At that point, there were 49 cases of Ebola that had resulted in the deaths of 29 people from the disease. Since the outbreak, Ebola has claimed the lives of more than 10,000 people in West Africa. But, the United Nations now believes that the Ebola outbreak could be gone by the end of August.
In the wake of the Ebola pandemic, researchers in China have identified a virus capable of global infection that has been mutating and brewing on the sidelines. A strain of the avian influenza, the H7N9 flu emerged in eastern China in Feb. 2013 in a small population with a mortality rate of roughly 33%. But over the last year, since it reemerged in October 2013, the virus has been spreading steadily, and mutating along the way. Now public health officials fear that the growing viral infection may soon reach the levels much like the Ebola outbreak, and it is something that researchers are heavily investigating.
While these little arachnids are not much to look at, ticks are the carriers of a myriad of diseases, which makes them of great importance to researchers. History has shown that they can cause sepsis, this past summer researchers discovered that the Lone Star tick can create a severe allergy to red meats, and now health officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that a new tick-borne virus can even cause multiple organ failure.