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Ebola virus disease treatment research


Ebola virus disease (research) or simply Ebola, is a disease that affects humans and other primates caused by ebolaviruses; there is no cure or specific treatment that is currently approved, treatment is primarily supportive in nature.

In March 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a major Ebola outbreak in Guinea, a western African nation. The disease then rapidly spread to the neighboring countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone. The 2014 West African Ebola outbreak is the largest Ebola outbreak ever documented, and the first recorded in the region.

The director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has stated that the scientific community is still in the early stages of understanding how infection with the Ebola virus can be treated and prevented. The unavailability of treatments in the most-affected regions has spurred controversy, with some calling for experimental drugs to be made more widely available in Africa on a humanitarian basis, and others warning that making unproven drugs widely available would be unethical, especially in light of past experimentation conducted in developing countries by Western drug companies. As a result of the controversy, on 12 August an expert panel of the WHO endorsed the use of interventions with as-yet-unknown effects for both treatment and prevention of Ebola, and also said that deciding which treatments should be used and how to distribute them equitably were matters that needed further discussion.

Conventional trials to study efficacy by exposure of humans to the pathogen are obviously not feasible in this case. For such situations, the FDA has established the "Animal Efficacy Rule" allowing limited licensure to be approved on the basis of animal model studies that replicate human disease, combined with evidence of safety. A number of experimental treatments are being considered for use in the context of this outbreak, and are currently or will soon undergo clinical trials. A distributed computing project, Outsmart Ebola Together, has been launched by World Community Grid in collaboration with the Scripps Research Institute to help find chemical compounds to fight the disease. It uses the idle processing capacity of volunteers' computers and tablets.


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