Borowitz: Some Fear Ebola Outbreak Could Make Nation Turn to Science

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/26456-some-fear-ebola-outbreak-could-make-nation-turn-to-science

There is a deep-seated fear among some Americans that an Ebola outbreak could make the country turn to science.

In interviews conducted across the nation, leading anti-science activists expressed their concern that the American people, wracked with anxiety over the possible spread of the virus, might desperately look to science to save the day.

“It’s a very human reaction,” said Harland Dorrinson, a prominent anti-science activist from Springfield, Missouri. “If you put them under enough stress, perfectly rational people will panic and start believing in science.”

[Warren DeMontague]

1. It'd be nice if it would provoke some soul-searching at big pharma corps, but I won't hold my breath

the fact is we probably could have had a vaccine tested and ready to ship years ago, if there had been any $$$$ 'incentive' $$$$

[davidn3600]

2. Ebola isn't that easy to develop a vaccine against

The issue is that it isn't stupid. It slips past the immune system for quite some time by using some sophisticated evasion mechanisms. That makes it difficult to design a vaccine since a vaccine requires an immune response.

We've been trying to find a vaccine for HIV for a long time without success.

[Warren DeMontague]

3. Yeah, but I actually think ebola isn't, in many ways, as advanced a virus structure as HIV.

Also, the point of a vaccine is to give it before infection, generally, so if you can prime the immune system to produce antibodies against specific proteins on the surface of the virus, the blood will contain them and the proteins will bind to the virus before it can infect and disable the immune system.

I think ebola is sort of a simpler structure than HIV.. it has like 7 basic proteins and I don't think there is really all that much variation in the surface ones or the ones which mediate entry into the cell. I think HIV is more flu-like in that it has this coat which is constantly evolving to change the surface proteins.

I don't know, I'm not a virologist- I don't even play one on tv- but I was under the impression that they have several promising vaccine candidates as well as treatments like ZMAPP, which of course is nowhere near being ready to scale up since they have to grow it in genetically engineered tobacco plants.

Still, the vaccines that are in the pipeline could have been ready a while ago, to my understanding. The "market" was the problem, or lack thereof.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-isnt-there-an-ebola-vaccine/

"The main reason is that up until the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, it was not a very high priority," says Dr. Myron Levine, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He's been working on vaccines -- including one for Ebola -- for 44 years.

***

"You have a company that says, 'Let's see, maybe I could make a pill that everybody takes every day, whatever it is, a lipid lowering agent, another kind of Viagra, what have you -- they put a lot of money in to get that product, that wasn't the case with Ebola," Fauci says. So the bulk of the research was left to government funding. Earlier this week, NIH director Francis Collins said we'd likely have a vaccine already if not for a decade of budget cuts.

..and, there you go.

[HoosierCowboy]

4. We'll be able to tell

When Kim's fat ass is back on the front page again. We can't have the masses believing in science.

[KG]

5. funny how it's making conservatives turn to the gov't

[tecelote]

6. Who needs science when we have prayer.

If we all pray really, really hard...

[ReRe]

7. .

That was a good one, Borowitz...