I'm surprised that so much of the coverage of ZMapp doesn't include the fact that the drug is produced in tobacco plants.<p>To me, this is the single most interesting and impressive fact. It's also likely the main reason why "the limited supplies will not help the 20,000 people predicted to be infected during the outbreak in West Africa." Scaling production of antibodies grown in plants can't possibly be straightforward.
In this NYT article:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/30/world/africa/study-says-zmapp-works-against-ebola-but-making-it-takes-time.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/30/world/africa/study-says-zm...</a><p>It mentions that all 3 control group animals died.<p>Does anyone know why the control group is so small compared to the test group of 18?
why we still test effectiveness on animals when there are several thousands of people who has no downside and only upside for the drug to be tested on them? Ethics? It would be a strange ethics that had worked only until an American needed the cure. Something isn't right that this drug got out of shadow only when there was a need to cure an American. I mean, of course, thanks God, that i have real chance of soon becoming an American too :)
Does anyone know why the WHO reporting frequency seems to be irregular? Recently it seems to be timed with the release of defensibly bad versus downright scary figures. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebola_virus_outbreak#Timeline_of_the_outbreak" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebola_virus_o...</a>
It's interesting to me that people are working on a cure for Ebola yet no one is deeply interested in working on new antibiotics. Ebola is a scary disease yet rare (across the entire planet) so there doesn't seem to be a lot of monetary reason to invest in it. Antibiotic resistance is far more widespread. I guess I don't always understand how the pharmaceutical industry decides what to look at.