Clever strategy<p><i>Dr. Muyembe set out on his path to an Ebola treatment during the 1995 outbreak. He transferred blood from five survivors to eight patients, hoping that the antibodies that kept some people alive would keep others from dying. Seven of the patients who received the blood transfusion recovered.</i>
Worth pointing out that there are two Ebola vaccines on the market. One is a recombinant vesticular stomavirus, VSV-EBOV, that was engineered to express an Ebola glycoprotein. It was found to be reliably efficient up to 5 days before infection in macaques. It requires only one dose to be effective, because the VSV will replicate in the host to some degree (asymptomatically) and produce a strong immune response.<p>There is also another 2-dose vaccine that is actually being distributed. I don't know much about it, but requiring a second dose likely means it's a protein fragment or attenuated Ebola virus, likely making it more heat stable and actually easier to distribute. Compliance is an issue, but it has proven effective in ring vaccination usage (vaccination of those around people who have contracted the disease).<p>There's also been some initiative to grow human Ebola antibodies in crops and distribute those as well.<p>As usual, the primary challenge to stopping Ebola spread is the political and social climate in the war torn DRC.
What happened to the Chinese scientist who developed the Ebola cure ZMapp?<p><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ebola-henipah-china-1.5232674" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ebola-henipah-china-...</a>
There was some news regarding the use of malariotherapy for Ebola, indicating some promise, from couple of years ago. Did not hear any more about it since then.