Ebola Killing Great Apes!

Story by Yaron Steinburch

Originally posted http://nypost.com/2015/01/20/ebola-has-wiped-out-13-of-the-worlds-great-apes/

Ebola poses the greatest threat to the survival of our nearest cousins — gorillas and chimps, a third of which have died from the deadly virus since the 1990s.

The disease is even deadlier for the great apes than it is for humans, according to the report in The Conversation, a nonprofit media outlet.

Mortality rates for gorillas are about 95 percent and 77 percent for chimpanzees. For humans, it is about 50 percent.

Meera Inglis, a doctoral candidate in conservation policy at the University of Sheffield, wrote that as with humans, deaths among the apes come in epidemics.

An outbreak in 1995 killed more than 90 percent of gorillas in a park in Gabon. In 2002-03, another outbreak killed about 5,000 gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There are only about 100,000 gorillas left in the wild, Inglis reported.

The great apes also are decimated by illegal trading in wildlife, deforestation, wars and other infectious diseases.

“The world’s remaining wild apes are being increasingly forced into isolated pockets of forest, which impedes their ability to forage, breed and to hide from hunters,” she wrote.

“If we do not act fast, these may prove to be the last decades in which apes can continue to live in their natural habitat,” she added. “Unfortunately, there appears to be a lack of political will to implement policies which would bring viable solutions into effect.”

A safe and effective vaccine has already been developed for apes, she wrote, but “trials have not involved ‘challenging’ the vaccinated chimps with the live virus.”

“Across much of Europe, medical research on great apes is either banned or highly restricted because of their cognitive similarity to humans,” she wrote. “The question is whether or not we should make an exception in this case.”

Meanwhile..in the real world

Story by Maggie Fox

The Ebola virus strain that's killed more than 8,600 people in West Africa is mutating in a way that could make experimental drugs less likely to help, researchers reported Tuesday.

They said they'd found 10 new mutations that might interfere with how three of the most advanced drugs work against Ebola. The drugs, including the experimental ZMapp given to several Ebola survivors, should be tested against the current strain, the researchers said.

"Based on our findings, the virus has changed and is continuing to change," said Jeffrey Kugelman, a viral geneticist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), who led the research published in the journal mBio.

All viruses mutate, some faster than others. Ebola changes slightly from outbreak to outbreak, and the more people or animals infected, the more likely the virus is to mutate as it replicates inside a living body.

"The virus has changed and is continuing to change."

The virus that's sickened more than 21,000 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone is called Ebolavirus Makona variant. It's similar to the strains that have caused outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire.

Kugelman's team, with researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, compared the genetic sequence of the Ebola Makona samples to Ebola Zaire and found 600 mutations. That sounds like a lot, but may not mean much for treatment.

However, they found 10 mutations that affect the parts of the virus targeted by treatments including ZMapp, a drug made by the Canadian company Tekmira, and one called AVI-7537, being developed by Massachusetts-based Sarepta Therapeutics.

All these drugs are specifically designed to attack Ebola based on its physical structure. ZMapp, made by San Diego-based Mapp Biotherapeutics, consists of three genetically engineered immune system proteins called monoclonal antibodies. They are designed to recognize and neutralize Ebola.

"Their efficacy should be reevaluated against the currently circulating strain."

The Tekmira and Sarepta drugs are based on an approach called antisense. They're designed to interfere with the virus by sticking to it and stopping it from infecting cells.

The mutations affect the bits of the virus that these three drugs are specifically designed to interfere with or recognize, Kugelman's team said.

"Their efficacy should be reevaluated against the currently circulating strain," they suggested.

The World Health Organization has approved the use of experimental therapies to fight the Ebola epidemic. ZMapp has done well in monkeys, but they were not infected with Ebola Makona. And while most of the human patients given ZMapp survived, not all have, and doctors stress they have no idea if the drug has actually helped anyone.

The same is true of Tekmira's drug.

SOURCE