ALSO SEE: FDA Lifts Hold on Experimental Ebola Drug

Why the White Americans Got the 'Secret' Ebola Serum

By Michael Daly, The Daily Beast

08 August 14

After two missionaries were given an experimental treatment for Ebola, questions have swirled about why the hundreds of Africans infected aren’t getting it. For good reasons, it turns out.

Washington Post blog asks: “Why do two white Americans get the Ebola serum while hundreds of Africans die?”

The New Republic demands: “Why did two U.S. missionaries get an Ebola serum while Africans are left to die?”

That was just media yammering, but it was echoed on streets and in subways by otherwise reasonable people.

Never mind that there seem to have been no more than eight doses of the serum in existence.

Never mind that the white people in question—Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol—who received three of those doses before they were flown home to the U.S. got perilously ill in the first place because they risked their lives helping Ebola victims in Liberia who happened to be black.

And never mind that Samaritan’s Purse would not have established the Ebola clinic in Monrovia and asked Brantly serve as medical director had it thought the life of a white American was worth more than the life of a black African.

If nationality and race did influence the organization’s decision to seek an untested serum for Brantly and Writebol, it was likely only because any Western organization that administers an untested serum to the African population runs the risk of being accused of using blacks as guinea pigs in the way of the long-ago Tuskegee syphilis tests and the 1996 meningitis tests in Nigeria.

That was not a worry with the two white Americans.

Of course, Samantha’s Purse may not have been immune from the sense of urgency that can seize even the most altruistic organizations when one of its own is in mortal danger. The same is true with a fire department when a firefighter is critically injured.

Watch what happens at the scene of a blaze when a radio call of “Mayday!” signals that a firefighter who went in to save others suddenly needs saving himself.

This does not mean firefighters care any less about the people they are trying to save any more than it means Samaritan’s Purse was leaving Africans to die when it began asking U.S. scientists and health workers in the hot zone about experimental treatments described in various scientific papers in recent years.

Samaritan’s Purse ended up in contact with Mapp Biopharmaceutical in San Diego, the lead developer of a drug called ZMapp.

ZMapp is an enhanced version of MB-003, which was developed in conjunction with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). MB-003 consists of three monoclonal—artificially produced—antibodies that proved capable of both deactivating the Ebola virus and tagging it for attack by the victim’s immune system.

A year ago this month, USAMRIID and Mapp announced the results of a study involving Rhesus monkeys that would have caused a sensation had we not been in a long lull between Ebola outbreaks. MB-003 protected 100 percent of the monkeys when administered an hour after exposure and two-thirds of those given the drug 48 hours after exposure.

“We were able to use MB-003 as a true therapeutic countermeasure,” USAMIID virologist Gene Olinger said when the results were announced.

James Pettitt, the study’s lead author, said he and his colleagues would be working with Canadian researchers who had devised a different antibody cocktail. The immediate aim would be to devise the most effective mixture of MB-003 and the Canadian compound and test it in additional monkeys, along with the best dose.

The combination was called ZMAPP. The ultimate results are said to have been even more promising than with MB-003 alone. But Ebola did not seem an imminent threat, and there was no scramble to produce more of the stuff than would be needed for animal toxicity testing and eventually the first human trials, which USAMIID expected to take between five to 10 years.

The federal Centers for Disease Control estimates that there were no more than eight doses of ZMapp in existence when Samaritan's Purse sought some. Three doses were flown to Liberia. Two were given to Writebol and one to Brantly, who was repeatedly also given a transfusion of blood from a 14-year-old survivor he had treated.

The two stricken Americans were flown to Atlanta, and Brantly in particular seemed to be on the mend. Governments of the affected countries in West African began inquiring about Zmapp. U.S. scientists cautioned that the drug had not yet proven to be as beneficial to humans as it apparently was to monkeys.

“We don’t know if it is effective,” Dr. Heinz Feldmann of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease told The Daily Beast. “We don’t have enough even if it was effective.”

ZMapp is made by inserting modified genes into the cells of tobacco plants whose cells then become mini-factories of the antibodies. The facility where this happens is owned by R.J. Reynolds, which also makes cigarettes that kill by the hundreds of thousands.

Reynolds is now said to be accelerating its effort to do good as well as evil, but tobacco plants grow only so fast, and extracting and purifying antibodies is considerably more complicated than producing cancer sticks. Any significant quantity of ZMapp appears to be months away even if another company with a larger facility joins in the effort.

The question of the serum came up at the press conference President Obama held at the end of this week’s Africa Summit at the White House. He said it would be premature to rush ZMapp to the hot zone.

“Let the science guide us,” he went on to say. “I don't think all the information is in on whether this drug is helpful.”

He observed that previous epidemics had been brought under control by effective public health programs.

“We’re focusing on the public health approach right now, but I will continue to seek information about what we’re learning about these drugs going forward,” he said.

Obama did authorize sending kits for a diagnostic Ebola test called the EZ1 Real-Time RT-PCR Assay. His view that the primary focus should be on containment was echoed by the head of the Centers for Disease Control at an emergency congressional hearing held on Thursday even though lawmakers are in recess.

“In terms of the promising drugs, I can assure you that the U.S. government is looking into this very carefully,” Dr. Thomas Frieden said. “But I don’t want there to be false hope out there. Right now, we don’t know if they work.”

The CDC is moving to assist the fight by going to a Level 1 alert and “surging” 50 experts to West Africa. Frieden emphasized that containment will require great care.

“It’s like fighting a forest fire: Leave behind one burning ember, one case undetected, and the epidemic could reignite,” he said.

When it came his turn to testify, Ken Isaacs of Samaritan’s Purse wondered why the forest fire had been allowed to rage for months with little notice beyond those who were being consumed by it. The scandal is not that two white people got an untested serum, but that the deaths of so many black people were ignored until two white people got sick.

“It took two Americans getting the disease in order for the international community and the United States to take serious notice of the largest outbreak of the disease in history,” he said. “The disease is uncontained and out of control in West Africa.”

Isaacs, who is a vice president of the organization, spoke as someone who has been watching the fire rage for months and believes it will be harder to contain than many anticipate. He said that too many people in Western Africa remain suspicious of Western medicine and tied to traditional practices that spread the virus, notably the washing and kissing of the dead. He noted that even now university students in Liberia “continue to mock and deny the existence of Ebola.”

“I think we are going to see the death toll in numbers we cannot imagine,” Ken Isaacs said.

He noted that the disease can travel anywhere “at the speed of an airplane.” He said the ultimate goal should be an effective vaccine.

“In the meantime it is a nasty, bloody disease that we must fight now,” he said.

Government Fails to Protect Americans From Superbug Epidemic

By Thom Hartmann, EcoWatch

08 August 14

et’s talk about America’s farm­grown terrorism epidemic. Back on Sept. 11, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives in the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Since 9/11, our government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on military and homeland security operations in response to the deaths of those roughly 3,000 souls. Now, compare that to the fact that each year, 23,000 Americans die from antibiotic-resistant infections, and another 2 million get sick. That’s the equivalent of nearly eight 9/11?s per year. But our government isn’t doing a thing about it.

Each year, Big Agriculture feeds millions and millions of pounds of antibiotics to factory farm animals, all to slightly increase their profits by plumping up their meat. In 2011 alone, nearly 30 million pounds of antibiotics were purchased by Big Agriculture, to promote growth in the animals, and to reduce the spread of disease in the horrific factory ­farm conditions. That 30 million pounds is a staggering four times the amount of antibiotics that were prescribed to humans that year.

These are otherwise healthy animals, but they’re getting dosed daily with low­ levels of antibiotics anyway. As a result, this widespread and unnecessary use of antibiotics in factory­farm animals is creating a major public health crisis here in the U.S by breeding antibiotic resistant infections caused by bacteria referred to in the media as superbugs.

But rather then enforcing regulations already in place to control the use of antibiotics in factory­ farm animals, our federal government is bowing to the interests of Big Agriculture, and is continuing to let the abuse go on.

Just last week, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Food and Drug Administration could leave an antibiotic that’s used in animal feed on the market, even though the dangers associated with that antibiotic are widely known, including the increased risk of antibiotic resistance infections jumping to human beings. Basically, the court gave Big Agriculture the go­ahead to continue pumping millions and millions of pounds of antibiotics into poultry and livestock, with no concern for public safety.

So, why should Americans care about this? Well, for starters, Americans eat a lot of meat. And the superbugs and antibiotic­resistant bacteria that are bred on factory farms very easily make their way into our food system.

For example, last year, a drug­resistant salmonella outbreak tied to chicken from Foster Farms sickened more than 600 Americans, and that outbreak is still getting worse today. And if that wasn’t bad enough, these antibiotic­resistant superbugs also get into our water supply, and into soil for crops. The situation is so dire that, speaking about antibiotic resistance, Dr. Thomas Freidman, director of the Centers for Disease Control, said that, “If we don’t act now, our medicine cabinet will be empty and we won’t have the antibiotics we need to save lives.”

If 23,000 Americans are already dying from superbugs and antibiotic­resistant infections each year, just imagine how much worse it could get as this antibiotic abuse continues. We could soon have a full­blown pandemic on our hands. But it doesn’t have to get worse. We can stop this farm­grown terrorism right now, andsave millions of lives.

Big Agriculture says that slashing its use of antibiotics will hurt all of us in the form of higher prices at the supermarket, but that’s simply not the case. As Ruth Reichl points out over at The New York Times, “Although many industrial farmers claim that cleaning up their act will cost the rest of us at the cash register, responsible producers from Missouri to Denmark are already raising healthy livestock and poultry at competitive prices without the use of unnecessary drugs.”

Reichl highlights the story of Russ Kremer, a fifth­generation pork farm in Missouri, who, after nearly being killed by an antibiotic­resistant infection on his own farm, decided to do things the all natural way. He lets his pigs roam free, and doesn’t have to stuff them full of antibiotics, because they’re not living in squalor. And, thanks to competitive prices, his meat is bought by companies like Chipotle and Costco.

So Big Agriculture’s “higher meat prices” argument is complete bologna. Pun intended. The use of antibiotics on factory farms is all about profits for Big Agriculture, But, with 23,000 Americans dying each year as a result, it’s time to start putting the American people ahead of profits.

Meat producers and sellers across the country need to say “no” to more superbugs. No animals on factory farms should ever be given antibiotics, unless diagnosed as sick by a veterinarian. And while we’re at it, we need to work harder to close down Washington’s revolving door, which encourages employees in government agencies like the FDA to get bought off by corporate interests and then turn a blind eye to corporate abuse.

We have a right to eat food that’s not going to kill us.