61 ms·

Ebola Is Now Curable

1232 points by jelliclesfarm 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bifrost 7y ago
This is awesome that we've seen another horrendous disease go from incurable to curable in my lifetime. While ebola hasn't touched my community like AIDS/HIV has, reading this cracked my RBF and I smiled.
- Retric 7y ago
  A 6% to 30% fatality rate depending on how early the treatment is not what I would call a cure. However, at best 6% fatality rate is still huge progress.
  - kijin 7y ago
    That fatality rate could be the difference between "Meh, I'll probably die anyway and there's nothing anyone can do about it" and "Get me to the doctor asap!" in people's minds -- especially if it is known that early treatment dramatically increases the odds of survival.
  - bifrost 7y ago
    FWIW Early AIDS treatments were pretty bleak in terms of success but that didn't stop people from making it better. It seems like ebola treatments have advanced much faster than they did with AIDS so I'll take it as a net win :)
  - freewilly1040 7y ago
    30% is still huge progress!
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  It is great news, and also evidence of how much better it is to be aware of diseases that happen in remote, poor parts of the world. If the rich world had ignored Ebola because it was happening to poor people (mostly, so far), then it could have become an AIDS/HIV sized epidemic (including in the rich world) before these treatments were developed. Plus the good karma of not just sitting there while your neighbor's house burns to the ground, of course.
  - mlrtime 7y ago
    Not everything needs to be rich vs poor, I know your message is positive however we are not living in such a dire world where this needs to be pointed out.
pkaye 7y ago
Aren't monoclonal antibodies harder and thus more expensive to manufacturer though?
- toyg 7y ago
  Does it really matter?
  - opportune 7y ago
    Well, most of the countries impacted by ebola are quite poor, but I think even ignoring humanitarian concerns, it's probably in wealthier countries' best interests to pay for it strictly from an epidemiological perspective
    - mpoteat 7y ago
      Plus, also incentives research.
    - Fomite 7y ago
      One thing I've often said about infectious disease epidemiology is the Bush Doctrine ("We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here") is terrible for insurgencies, but excellent for microbes.
  - sp332 7y ago
    The WHO is already running out of funds. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-07-24/ebola-funding-needs-to-triple-video https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-07-24/ebola-fundi...
  - pkaye 7y ago
    Its good that it exists but it might be very expensive to use it across a broad population. Unlike the older pills that were expensive due to patent exclusivity, here fundamentally each pill is more expensive to make.
- xkcd-sucks 7y ago
  The only reason they need to be monoclonal is for drug safety regulations. It's easier to estimate efficacy with a drug of known composition, and safety is much easier too because immune responses to different proteins are tricky to predict. With a polyclonal, manufacturers would need to prove safety on every single antibody and guarantee composition of the mixture.
throwaway5752 7y ago
It's great news, but they're observing a 30% mortality rate for the "cure". Absent medical intervention there is still a nontrivial survival rate (mortality rate of 75-90%). With supporting medical treatment before this new treatment - fluid support, etc - I think it's up to 50%? It sounds like the monoclonal antibody treatment has improved odds of survival from 1:10-1:2 to 2:3. edit: The 6% figure is population restricted to early interventions. I am uncomfortably out of my limited knowledge here, but I think that early intervention numbers are better across the board. I'd want to compare the 6% number to the control. And I don't want to see a control! It is such a good result no matter how you look at it that they wisely halted the trial.
- sp332 7y ago
  Other treatments mentioned in the same paragraph cut mortality rates to 34% or 29%.
  - squeaky-clean 7y ago
    If I'm reading this right, the 29% and 6% are the same drug. It has a 6% mortality rate when administered very early in the illness. > The monoclonal antibody cocktail produced by a company called Regeneron Pharmaceuticals had the biggest impact on lowering death rates, down to 29 percent, while NIAID’s monoclonal antibody, called mAb114, had a mortality rate of 34 percent. The results were most striking for patients who received treatments soon after becoming sick, when their viral loads were still low—death rates dropped to 11 percent with mAb114 and just 6 percent with Regeneron’s drug, compared with 24 percent with ZMapp and 33 percent with Remdesivir.
- nsxwolf 7y ago
  Article says 6% unless I'm misunderstanding something.
  - _Nat_ 7y ago
    Their best-overall reduced down to 29%. The 6%-figure was for a sub-population of victims who received one of the treatments early. There's probably a sub-sub-population of young-adult victims who're in good health and received early treatment who had a near-0% rate, too. From glancing at Wikipedia's numbers, it seems that the average Ebola victim faces about 50% odds, so this'd improve that to about 29%. But, with-or-without this treatment, people who receive care, especially early, enjoy better odds than their peers who don't.
Medicalidiot 7y ago
I want to know how long it will take for Ebola to evolve a resistance to this therapy.
- mars4rp 7y ago
  How you would know that? You only could know after it happened. Evolution is random.
  - worldsayshi 7y ago
    Well, going out on a limb here, there should still be some way to give a statistical apprehension of how likely such mutation could be over time. But I'm not aware if there's any feasibility of doing that today.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- duskwuff 7y ago
  This therapy is intended for use in an intensive care environment. If the patient is able to pass on their infection in that environment, something is very wrong.
  - Fomite 7y ago
    Treating Ebola patients in intensive care environments without a single breach in containment protocol is astonishingly difficult, even for trained and experienced teams.
- _Nat_ 7y ago
  Viruses tend to evolve pretty quickly. In fact, Ebola's already not just one strain, so differing Ebola strains are likely more prone to different versions of this treatment. In practice, it'll probably work out to be sorta like the issue with flu vaccinations, where health organizations will have to predict which strains are likely to be out there and then prepare accordingly. Still, even if Ebola somehow rapidly evolved to completely ward off the current treatments, it's moreso the technology that created these treatments that's a breakthrough. So, if Ebola adapts, presumably they'd just update the treatments. That said, the current treatments probably aren't very optimized yet, either. These are early successes; future results seem liable to be much better.
MaxBarraclough 7y ago
Much-needed Outline.com of the article: https://outline.com/MJaPqX https://outline.com/MJaPqX Wired.com is almost literally unreadable. It's a caricature of all that's wrong with modern web design. Is everyone else seeing what I'm seeing? http://u.cubeupload.com/temp9871/wired.png http://u.cubeupload.com/temp9871/wired.png
- buzzert 7y ago
  With JavaScript disabled, the Wired article loads fine and the outline.com article doesn't load at all. I'd say you have that backwards.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Outline.com is one site which, if you allow JS for it, provides access and a consistent, reader-friendly view for many, many others. (Sadly, not all.) There are other options -- Reader View in Firefox and w3m in console are two I use frequently. For browsers other than Firefox, Outline is useful and I'm grateful it exists.
    - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
      Safari has a Reader Mode too, and Chrome has one which they call 'Distill', but you have to enable the button with the --enable-dom-distiller command-line flag. https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-enable-reader-mode-in-chrome/ https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-enable-reader-mode-in-chr...
- akkartik 7y ago
  I recently got into the habit of swinging Firefox's reader view (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...) on a hair trigger. A single click on any of my devices, it cuts an awesome swathe through the internet jungle. For now.
  - inetknght 7y ago
_Nat_ 7y ago
The title calling it "curable" feels a bit misleading. To explain... Ebola's a viral infection, like the common cold or the flu. If someone gets sick with it, then usually their immune system should fight it off naturally, just like the common cold or the flu. And just like a cold/flu, there hasn't really been a cure for it; instead, Ebola sufferers would be put on bed-rest with fluids to resist dehydration, fever management, etc., while the body fights it off. However, Ebola's symptoms tend to be severe. Glancing at Wikipedia's figures, it seems that about 50% of people who get it die -- which probably varies a lot by the exact strain, health of the victim, support received while sick, etc.. Many victims end up making a full recovery, though some end up taking more long-term damage from the trauma. As I'm reading it, they've observed that some victims tend to fight off Ebola with relative success. So, they appear to be trying to copy those survivors' defenses via [monoclonal antibodies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody), then pass that on to Ebola sufferers. Since they're basically optimizing a victim's immune system with specially selected antibodies, the victim still suffers Ebola and fights it off as usual, just they're getting some pretty powerful backup in that fight. And apparently the results are pretty good so far! The article reports: > The monoclonal antibody cocktail produced by a company called Regeneron Pharmaceuticals had the biggest impact on lowering death rates, down to 29 percent, while NIAID’s monoclonal antibody, called mAb114, had a mortality rate of 34 percent. The results were most striking for patients who received treatments soon after becoming sick, when their viral loads were still low—death rates dropped to 11 percent with mAb114 and just 6 percent with Regeneron’s drug, compared with 24 percent with ZMapp and 33 percent with Remdesivir. The article exaggerates a bit by citing the mortality rates for people who don't receive any support; that seems like an unreasonable figure since this treatment is an advanced form of support, so presumably it'll improve the odds of those who do get support. So, if mortality rates are about 50%, then presumably they can drop that to about 29% overall, with people who seek treatment earlier enjoying the greatest benefit with mortality rates dropping to 6%. Realistically speaking, this seems to suggest that this "cure" reduces an individual's odds-of-death by a bit shy of 50%; that leaves a lot to be desired. Still, it's awesome because: 1. Any progress on something like this is awesome. 2. This sort of technology can rapidly improve, so the current positive results may just be the beginning.
- 7y ago
Kenji 7y ago
Ebola is not a problem. The number of deaths caused annually by ebola worldwide is about ten times the number of people who die by falling out of bed per year in the US. Just to give you a perspective when you go to bed tonight. Nobody cares about ebola except a very small fraction of people who ignore the most basic principles of hygiene and germ theory. The press likes Ebola because it's easy to rile up people and cause panic for no reason whatsoever.
dankohn1 7y ago
There is no news I enjoy reading more than that a clinical trial had to be ended early because the treatment was so effective that it would be unethical to continue with alternative treatments (or a placebo).
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Actually, it's quite terrifying when you remember that stopping a clinical trial early is a great way to create statistical fraud. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/08/08/stopping-early https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/08/08/st... cites an example of a drug whose clinical trial was stopped early due to obviously effective success... only to discover later on that the "obviously effective" was a statistically spurious event, and the drug did not confer any benefits whatsoever.
  - singingboyo 7y ago
    While I agree in general, the article indicates this was stopped after 681 of a planned 725 patients, which seems okay. Additionally, my understanding from a quick read is that the SPMS trials were aiming to delay progression in disability, rather than eliminate the effects altogether. That seems trickier to measure, and also more subject to just... not spending enough time looking at it. Ebola, on the other hand, has a binary outcome (dead vs cured) with a timeline of a couple weeks, IIRC.
    - justinclift 7y ago
      > Ebola, on the other hand, has a binary outcome (dead vs cured) with a timeline of a couple weeks, IIRC. Doesn't it leave (cured) people potentially permanently damaged as well? eg whatever organs were damaged, are still damaged
      - hanniabu 7y ago
        I think what the parent meant was that it's terminal, so if you're alive then you win, even if you're not in the condition you were before.
WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
An Ebola cure is impressive but what's just as impressive if not more is the method of getting to the cure. Virus based infections have notoriously been hard to cure once infected. The fact that antibodies can now be engineered to cure a virus-based infection is mind-blowing to me.
thomas 7y ago
Didn’t it just get more deadly a few headlines ago?
OnlineCourage 7y ago
WHO: two of the four drugs we thought would work did not work as well as expected. WIRED: EBOLA CURED https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/independent-monitoring-board-recommends-early-termination-ebola-therapeutics-trial-drc https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/independent-monitoring...
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  Both appear to be reasonable descriptions of the facts, mostly differing in being appropriate based on whether you had or had not already adopted the WHO’s positive expectations.
- aembleton 7y ago
  Off topic, but does this meme/way of writing have a name? It's used a lot in Youtube comments and it weirdly grates me.
  - laszlokorte 7y ago
    nobody: [1] [1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nobody https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nobody
- PeterisP 7y ago
  Well, if I may have a bad disease, don't really need four different cures; one is enough, and two is great.
RickJWagner 7y ago
Awesome. And humanity got a little better. There has never been a better time to be alive. We're so lucky.
jonnycomputer 7y ago
This is great news. The headline here "Ebola is Now Curable" seems premature when the observed mortality rate is @30%. What I am specifically interested in is whether the rate of new infections can be curtailed to below the self-sustaining threshold.
ladon86 7y ago
I really have to apologize if this is not a HN-quality comment, but I initially read this as a startup rebrand announcement. Ebola is now Curable (YC 17)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- billpg 7y ago
  I did that too. "Who the f... calls their business Ebola?".
  - class4behavior 7y ago
    May I suggest to you two HN's noprocrast feature. I think, you spend way too much time here. ;)
  - virusduck 7y ago
    Thus the need for a rebrand!
  - firethief 7y ago
    Actually, the electronic bola industry has prospective revenues coming out the wazoo
bigend 7y ago
So how many people ebola ever killed? Compared to, for instance, cancer or traffic accidents?
- jraph 7y ago
  If you are making the point that we'd better address cancer or traffic accidents, then your argument falls under the false dichotomy fallacy. This is probably why you've been downvoted. If your were not making this point, then I don't have the answer. :-)
  - aflag 7y ago
    Besides cancer numbers are a bit inflated because people are living more now. If you live long enough the odds of getting cancer is quite high. Whilst it's always good to extend life even more, even if it was a dichotomy, that seems less pressing than a diseases that are killing in their prime or even before they had a chance of having a good go.
- nashashmi 7y ago
  It's an epidemic right? It is about the speed of spread, not number of victims.
Iv 7y ago
A fact that many people miss about Ebola is that while its survival rate is very low when untreated, it becomes relatively high (I think in the 80%) with simple things like IV hydration. Basically you are going to lose a LOT of water through that infection. Feeding you water (and minerals) directly in the veins gives a surprisingly high survival rate. What makes Ebola so dangerous is the ease at which infection spreads within the medical staff and how quick it can occupy all your beds and "simple" IV devices. Depending on how it is made, a cure may not change much. If it relies on medical attention, then it probably won't change the high death rate of people outside medical care, which is what allows an epidemic to start.
- tigershark 7y ago
  Then why in the article says that when untreated the mortality is over 75%?
  - Iv 7y ago
    That's what I am saying:untreated it is very high, treated (even without a cure against the infection) it is much lower.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  As the article says, the mortality rate with current best treatment option is about 50%.
lisper 7y ago
> Patients receiving Zmapp in the four trial centers experienced an overall mortality rate of 49 percent, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (Mortality rates are in excess of 75 percent for infected individuals who don’t seek any form of treatment.) That doesn't sound like a "cure" to me. Significant progress to be sure, but in my mind to be considered a "cure" the mortality rate would have to drop to near zero.
justanegg 7y ago
This kind of headline is dangerous, it's possible people could be less fearful of it and relax borders (within africa, calm down)
JulianMorrison 7y ago
Good.
devit 7y ago
Is there a reason to not just take all those drugs at once? Wouldn't that give the best results?
Alliva 7y ago
The title is a bit of a clickbait as it clearly states that they didn't manage to cure it 100%
throwawygreenie 7y ago
Too bad. Ebola worked to control populations in areas known to be damaging for the environment. Population control must be part of any approach to run-away global warming.
joelx 7y ago
Did anyone else run into the nightmare subscribe pop up on wired?
- Tenemo 7y ago
  I really wanted to actually read the article but I just had to go back to the comments. The page was unusable, I got some subscription/popup endless loop, had to close a popup every 5 seconds. I assume it's because of some limitations of the built-in Chrome browser in materialistic app, but still, come on wired.
est 7y ago
Canada removed virologists and their students who helped develop ZMapp from the lab because they are Chinese https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-escorted-from-national-microbiology-lab-amidst-rcmp-investigation-1.5211567 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-e...
Jones23 7y ago
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1232 points by jelliclesfarm 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

This is awesome that we've seen another horrendous disease go from incurable to curable in my lifetime. While ebola hasn't touched my community like AIDS/HIV has, reading this cracked my RBF and I smiled.

Retric 7y ago
A 6% to 30% fatality rate depending on how early the treatment is not what I would call a cure. However, at best 6% fatality rate is still huge progress.
- kijin 7y ago
  That fatality rate could be the difference between "Meh, I'll probably die anyway and there's nothing anyone can do about it" and "Get me to the doctor asap!" in people's minds -- especially if it is known that early treatment dramatically increases the odds of survival.
- bifrost 7y ago
  FWIW Early AIDS treatments were pretty bleak in terms of success but that didn't stop people from making it better. It seems like ebola treatments have advanced much faster than they did with AIDS so I'll take it as a net win :)
- freewilly1040 7y ago
  30% is still huge progress!
rossdavidh 7y ago
It is great news, and also evidence of how much better it is to be aware of diseases that happen in remote, poor parts of the world. If the rich world had ignored Ebola because it was happening to poor people (mostly, so far), then it could have become an AIDS/HIV sized epidemic (including in the rich world) before these treatments were developed. Plus the good karma of not just sitting there while your neighbor's house burns to the ground, of course.
- mlrtime 7y ago
  Not everything needs to be rich vs poor, I know your message is positive however we are not living in such a dire world where this needs to be pointed out.

pkaye 7y ago

Aren't monoclonal antibodies harder and thus more expensive to manufacturer though?

toyg 7y ago
Does it really matter?
- opportune 7y ago
  Well, most of the countries impacted by ebola are quite poor, but I think even ignoring humanitarian concerns, it's probably in wealthier countries' best interests to pay for it strictly from an epidemiological perspective
  - mpoteat 7y ago
    Plus, also incentives research.
  - Fomite 7y ago
    One thing I've often said about infectious disease epidemiology is the Bush Doctrine ("We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here") is terrible for insurgencies, but excellent for microbes.
- sp332 7y ago
  The WHO is already running out of funds. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-07-24/ebola-funding-needs-to-triple-video https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-07-24/ebola-fundi...
- pkaye 7y ago
  Its good that it exists but it might be very expensive to use it across a broad population. Unlike the older pills that were expensive due to patent exclusivity, here fundamentally each pill is more expensive to make.
xkcd-sucks 7y ago
The only reason they need to be monoclonal is for drug safety regulations. It's easier to estimate efficacy with a drug of known composition, and safety is much easier too because immune responses to different proteins are tricky to predict. With a polyclonal, manufacturers would need to prove safety on every single antibody and guarantee composition of the mixture.

throwaway5752 7y ago

It's great news, but they're observing a 30% mortality rate for the "cure". Absent medical intervention there is still a nontrivial survival rate (mortality rate of 75-90%). With supporting medical treatment before this new treatment - fluid support, etc - I think it's up to 50%? It sounds like the monoclonal antibody treatment has improved odds of survival from 1:10-1:2 to 2:3. edit: The 6% figure is population restricted to early interventions. I am uncomfortably out of my limited knowledge here, but I think that early intervention numbers are better across the board. I'd want to compare the 6% number to the control. And I don't want to see a control! It is such a good result no matter how you look at it that they wisely halted the trial.

sp332 7y ago
Other treatments mentioned in the same paragraph cut mortality rates to 34% or 29%.
- squeaky-clean 7y ago
  If I'm reading this right, the 29% and 6% are the same drug. It has a 6% mortality rate when administered very early in the illness. > The monoclonal antibody cocktail produced by a company called Regeneron Pharmaceuticals had the biggest impact on lowering death rates, down to 29 percent, while NIAID’s monoclonal antibody, called mAb114, had a mortality rate of 34 percent. The results were most striking for patients who received treatments soon after becoming sick, when their viral loads were still low—death rates dropped to 11 percent with mAb114 and just 6 percent with Regeneron’s drug, compared with 24 percent with ZMapp and 33 percent with Remdesivir.
nsxwolf 7y ago
Article says 6% unless I'm misunderstanding something.
- _Nat_ 7y ago
  Their best-overall reduced down to 29%. The 6%-figure was for a sub-population of victims who received one of the treatments early. There's probably a sub-sub-population of young-adult victims who're in good health and received early treatment who had a near-0% rate, too. From glancing at Wikipedia's numbers, it seems that the average Ebola victim faces about 50% odds, so this'd improve that to about 29%. But, with-or-without this treatment, people who receive care, especially early, enjoy better odds than their peers who don't.

Medicalidiot 7y ago

I want to know how long it will take for Ebola to evolve a resistance to this therapy.

mars4rp 7y ago
How you would know that? You only could know after it happened. Evolution is random.
- worldsayshi 7y ago
  Well, going out on a limb here, there should still be some way to give a statistical apprehension of how likely such mutation could be over time. But I'm not aware if there's any feasibility of doing that today.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
duskwuff 7y ago
This therapy is intended for use in an intensive care environment. If the patient is able to pass on their infection in that environment, something is very wrong.
- Fomite 7y ago
  Treating Ebola patients in intensive care environments without a single breach in containment protocol is astonishingly difficult, even for trained and experienced teams.
_Nat_ 7y ago
Viruses tend to evolve pretty quickly. In fact, Ebola's already not just one strain, so differing Ebola strains are likely more prone to different versions of this treatment. In practice, it'll probably work out to be sorta like the issue with flu vaccinations, where health organizations will have to predict which strains are likely to be out there and then prepare accordingly. Still, even if Ebola somehow rapidly evolved to completely ward off the current treatments, it's moreso the technology that created these treatments that's a breakthrough. So, if Ebola adapts, presumably they'd just update the treatments. That said, the current treatments probably aren't very optimized yet, either. These are early successes; future results seem liable to be much better.

MaxBarraclough 7y ago

Much-needed Outline.com of the article: https://outline.com/MJaPqX https://outline.com/MJaPqX Wired.com is almost literally unreadable. It's a caricature of all that's wrong with modern web design. Is everyone else seeing what I'm seeing? http://u.cubeupload.com/temp9871/wired.png http://u.cubeupload.com/temp9871/wired.png

buzzert 7y ago
With JavaScript disabled, the Wired article loads fine and the outline.com article doesn't load at all. I'd say you have that backwards.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Outline.com is one site which, if you allow JS for it, provides access and a consistent, reader-friendly view for many, many others. (Sadly, not all.) There are other options -- Reader View in Firefox and w3m in console are two I use frequently. For browsers other than Firefox, Outline is useful and I'm grateful it exists.
  - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    Safari has a Reader Mode too, and Chrome has one which they call 'Distill', but you have to enable the button with the --enable-dom-distiller command-line flag. https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-enable-reader-mode-in-chrome/ https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-enable-reader-mode-in-chr...
akkartik 7y ago
I recently got into the habit of swinging Firefox's reader view (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...) on a hair trigger. A single click on any of my devices, it cuts an awesome swathe through the internet jungle. For now.
- inetknght 7y ago

_Nat_ 7y ago

The title calling it "curable" feels a bit misleading. To explain... Ebola's a viral infection, like the common cold or the flu. If someone gets sick with it, then usually their immune system should fight it off naturally, just like the common cold or the flu. And just like a cold/flu, there hasn't really been a cure for it; instead, Ebola sufferers would be put on bed-rest with fluids to resist dehydration, fever management, etc., while the body fights it off. However, Ebola's symptoms tend to be severe. Glancing at Wikipedia's figures, it seems that about 50% of people who get it die -- which probably varies a lot by the exact strain, health of the victim, support received while sick, etc.. Many victims end up making a full recovery, though some end up taking more long-term damage from the trauma. As I'm reading it, they've observed that some victims tend to fight off Ebola with relative success. So, they appear to be trying to copy those survivors' defenses via [monoclonal antibodies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody), then pass that on to Ebola sufferers. Since they're basically optimizing a victim's immune system with specially selected antibodies, the victim still suffers Ebola and fights it off as usual, just they're getting some pretty powerful backup in that fight. And apparently the results are pretty good so far! The article reports: > The monoclonal antibody cocktail produced by a company called Regeneron Pharmaceuticals had the biggest impact on lowering death rates, down to 29 percent, while NIAID’s monoclonal antibody, called mAb114, had a mortality rate of 34 percent. The results were most striking for patients who received treatments soon after becoming sick, when their viral loads were still low—death rates dropped to 11 percent with mAb114 and just 6 percent with Regeneron’s drug, compared with 24 percent with ZMapp and 33 percent with Remdesivir. The article exaggerates a bit by citing the mortality rates for people who don't receive any support; that seems like an unreasonable figure since this treatment is an advanced form of support, so presumably it'll improve the odds of those who do get support. So, if mortality rates are about 50%, then presumably they can drop that to about 29% overall, with people who seek treatment earlier enjoying the greatest benefit with mortality rates dropping to 6%. Realistically speaking, this seems to suggest that this "cure" reduces an individual's odds-of-death by a bit shy of 50%; that leaves a lot to be desired. Still, it's awesome because: 1. Any progress on something like this is awesome. 2. This sort of technology can rapidly improve, so the current positive results may just be the beginning.

7y ago

Kenji 7y ago

Ebola is not a problem. The number of deaths caused annually by ebola worldwide is about ten times the number of people who die by falling out of bed per year in the US. Just to give you a perspective when you go to bed tonight. Nobody cares about ebola except a very small fraction of people who ignore the most basic principles of hygiene and germ theory. The press likes Ebola because it's easy to rile up people and cause panic for no reason whatsoever.

dankohn1 7y ago

There is no news I enjoy reading more than that a clinical trial had to be ended early because the treatment was so effective that it would be unethical to continue with alternative treatments (or a placebo).

jcranmer 7y ago
Actually, it's quite terrifying when you remember that stopping a clinical trial early is a great way to create statistical fraud. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/08/08/stopping-early https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/08/08/st... cites an example of a drug whose clinical trial was stopped early due to obviously effective success... only to discover later on that the "obviously effective" was a statistically spurious event, and the drug did not confer any benefits whatsoever.
- singingboyo 7y ago
  While I agree in general, the article indicates this was stopped after 681 of a planned 725 patients, which seems okay. Additionally, my understanding from a quick read is that the SPMS trials were aiming to delay progression in disability, rather than eliminate the effects altogether. That seems trickier to measure, and also more subject to just... not spending enough time looking at it. Ebola, on the other hand, has a binary outcome (dead vs cured) with a timeline of a couple weeks, IIRC.
  - justinclift 7y ago
    > Ebola, on the other hand, has a binary outcome (dead vs cured) with a timeline of a couple weeks, IIRC. Doesn't it leave (cured) people potentially permanently damaged as well? eg whatever organs were damaged, are still damaged
    - hanniabu 7y ago
      I think what the parent meant was that it's terminal, so if you're alive then you win, even if you're not in the condition you were before.

WheelsAtLarge 7y ago

An Ebola cure is impressive but what's just as impressive if not more is the method of getting to the cure. Virus based infections have notoriously been hard to cure once infected. The fact that antibodies can now be engineered to cure a virus-based infection is mind-blowing to me.

thomas 7y ago

Didn’t it just get more deadly a few headlines ago?

OnlineCourage 7y ago

WHO: two of the four drugs we thought would work did not work as well as expected. WIRED: EBOLA CURED https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/independent-monitoring-board-recommends-early-termination-ebola-therapeutics-trial-drc https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/independent-monitoring...

dragonwriter 7y ago
Both appear to be reasonable descriptions of the facts, mostly differing in being appropriate based on whether you had or had not already adopted the WHO’s positive expectations.
aembleton 7y ago
Off topic, but does this meme/way of writing have a name? It's used a lot in Youtube comments and it weirdly grates me.
- laszlokorte 7y ago
  nobody: [1] [1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nobody https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nobody
PeterisP 7y ago
Well, if I may have a bad disease, don't really need four different cures; one is enough, and two is great.

RickJWagner 7y ago

Awesome. And humanity got a little better. There has never been a better time to be alive. We're so lucky.

jonnycomputer 7y ago

This is great news. The headline here "Ebola is Now Curable" seems premature when the observed mortality rate is @30%. What I am specifically interested in is whether the rate of new infections can be curtailed to below the self-sustaining threshold.

ladon86 7y ago

I really have to apologize if this is not a HN-quality comment, but I initially read this as a startup rebrand announcement. Ebola is now Curable (YC 17)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
billpg 7y ago
I did that too. "Who the f... calls their business Ebola?".
- class4behavior 7y ago
  May I suggest to you two HN's noprocrast feature. I think, you spend way too much time here. ;)
- virusduck 7y ago
  Thus the need for a rebrand!
- firethief 7y ago
  Actually, the electronic bola industry has prospective revenues coming out the wazoo

bigend 7y ago

So how many people ebola ever killed? Compared to, for instance, cancer or traffic accidents?

jraph 7y ago
If you are making the point that we'd better address cancer or traffic accidents, then your argument falls under the false dichotomy fallacy. This is probably why you've been downvoted. If your were not making this point, then I don't have the answer. :-)
- aflag 7y ago
  Besides cancer numbers are a bit inflated because people are living more now. If you live long enough the odds of getting cancer is quite high. Whilst it's always good to extend life even more, even if it was a dichotomy, that seems less pressing than a diseases that are killing in their prime or even before they had a chance of having a good go.
nashashmi 7y ago
It's an epidemic right? It is about the speed of spread, not number of victims.

Iv 7y ago

A fact that many people miss about Ebola is that while its survival rate is very low when untreated, it becomes relatively high (I think in the 80%) with simple things like IV hydration. Basically you are going to lose a LOT of water through that infection. Feeding you water (and minerals) directly in the veins gives a surprisingly high survival rate. What makes Ebola so dangerous is the ease at which infection spreads within the medical staff and how quick it can occupy all your beds and "simple" IV devices. Depending on how it is made, a cure may not change much. If it relies on medical attention, then it probably won't change the high death rate of people outside medical care, which is what allows an epidemic to start.

tigershark 7y ago
Then why in the article says that when untreated the mortality is over 75%?
- Iv 7y ago
  That's what I am saying:untreated it is very high, treated (even without a cure against the infection) it is much lower.
solidasparagus 7y ago
As the article says, the mortality rate with current best treatment option is about 50%.

lisper 7y ago

> Patients receiving Zmapp in the four trial centers experienced an overall mortality rate of 49 percent, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (Mortality rates are in excess of 75 percent for infected individuals who don’t seek any form of treatment.) That doesn't sound like a "cure" to me. Significant progress to be sure, but in my mind to be considered a "cure" the mortality rate would have to drop to near zero.

justanegg 7y ago

This kind of headline is dangerous, it's possible people could be less fearful of it and relax borders (within africa, calm down)

JulianMorrison 7y ago

Good.

devit 7y ago

Is there a reason to not just take all those drugs at once? Wouldn't that give the best results?

Alliva 7y ago

The title is a bit of a clickbait as it clearly states that they didn't manage to cure it 100%

throwawygreenie 7y ago

Too bad. Ebola worked to control populations in areas known to be damaging for the environment. Population control must be part of any approach to run-away global warming.

joelx 7y ago

Did anyone else run into the nightmare subscribe pop up on wired?

Tenemo 7y ago
I really wanted to actually read the article but I just had to go back to the comments. The page was unusable, I got some subscription/popup endless loop, had to close a popup every 5 seconds. I assume it's because of some limitations of the built-in Chrome browser in materialistic app, but still, come on wired.

est 7y ago

Canada removed virologists and their students who helped develop ZMapp from the lab because they are Chinese https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-escorted-from-national-microbiology-lab-amidst-rcmp-investigation-1.5211567 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-e...

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