WHO and CDC recommend that individuals who are potentially infected with Ebola virus should be quarantined for 21 days. Where does this number come from? Charles Haas at Drexel University asked the same question, and provides an answer. The quarantine period for an infectious disease is based on the incubation period, the time before symptoms of an infection appear. For Ebola virus, …
The World Health Organization held a conference to assess the status of testing and eventual licensing of two candidate Ebola virus vaccines. The agenda and list of participants and the final report are available. I was interested in the following list of key expected milestones: October 2014: Mechanisms for evaluating and sharing data in real time must be …
WHO assessment of experimental Ebola virus vaccines Read More »
An outbreak of respiratory disease caused by enterovirus D68 began in August of this year with clusters of cases in Missouri and Illinois. Since then 691 infections have been confirmed in 46 states in the US. The number of confirmed infections is likely to increase in the coming weeks, as CDC has developed a more rapid diagnostic …
The Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of a single pill containing two different antiviral drugs for the treatment for hepatitis C. It is the first combination pill approved for the disease, and also the first treatment that does not contain interferon or ribavirin. The new hepatitis C drug, called Harvoni, is a mixture …
The Liberian man who was diagnosed with Ebola virus infection after traveling to Dallas, Texas, was treated with an antiviral drug called brincidofovir. This drug had originally been developed to treat infections with DNA-containing viruses. Why was it used to treat an Ebola virus infection? Brincidofovir (illustrated) is a modified version of an antiviral drug …
Treatment of Ebola virus infection with brincidofovir Read More »
Vaccine-associated poliomyelitis caused by the oral poliovirus vaccine is rare, but its occurrence in a healthy, immunocompetent 6-month old child was highly unusual because the child had been previously immunized with two doses of the injected, inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV). The three poliovirus vaccine strains developed by Albert Sabin (OPV, oral poliovirus vaccine) contain mutations which prevent …
