Is America Ready for Ebola?
August 18, 2014
Washington Jewish Week – Inova Fairfax and Medstar Georgetown University hospitals, like so many others nationwide, are educating employees and reviewing protocols in the unlikely event that a person infected with Ebola enters their doors.
Ebola is a severe hemorrhagic (abnormal blood flow) virus that is fatal for some 50 to 60 percent of its victims. Its first symptoms are similar to many illnesses, including fever, chills, and bodyaches. As it progresses, a patient vomits, has bloodshot eyes and bleeds under the skin. It spreads quickly and can attack the kidneys, liver and brain.
Unlike respiratory and airborne viruses like smallpox, measles and influenza, which are highly contagious, “you really have to be very close” to someone with Ebola in order to catch it, explains Dr. Leslie Lobel, co-director of BGU’s Laboratory of Immunology in the Shraga Segal Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Genetics.
“The hysteria is overblown,” says Dr. Lobel, who has been working with Ebola survivors for 12 years. His research deals mainly with the Sudan strain of the virus (the current outbreak is a Zaire strain). He works in Africa four to five times a year.
Dr. Leslie Lobel at work
Most recently, he’s been in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he said. Dr. Lobel is buoyed by the cocktail of antibiotics that appears to be curing the two Americans who contracted Ebola while helping in Africa, but “even if this drug is a huge success, and I hope it is,” it will only be effective for this particular strain, he explains.
Dr. Lobel explained that survivors who had the strength to neutralize the virus could be the key to finding a cure which is why he isolates their antibodies and studies them.
Multiple approaches to curing Ebola are being researched at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda. In one study, researchers are partnering with biopharmaceutical companies to create a vaccine. Their investigational vaccine is expected to enter phase one clinical trials as early as this fall.
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