Ebola Virus

The first vaccine designed to prevent infection with the lethal Ebola virus has passed initial safety tests in humans and has shown promising signs that it may indeed protect people from contracting the disease, government scientists reported. Just 21 people received the vaccine in this early-stage testing. Dr. Gary Nabel and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health's Vaccine Research Center developed a vaccine made of DNA strands that encoded three Ebola proteins.

Synthetic nucleotides injected into monkeys can block the replication of Ebola and Marburg viruses, suggesting it eventually may be possible to protect humans against these deadly bioterrorism agents, researchers said Sunday. The monkeys get very sick, but most of them survive. The agents, called morpholino oligomers, are the first drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration to go into clinical trials against the viruses — although those trials will, at least initially, be conducted in primates, not humans.

The death toll from the Ebola virus climbed to 101 on Sunday, and health workers said the epidemic may have started as long ago as December--three months earlier than previously thought. Medical workers scouring Kikwit, a city of 600,000 where the outbreak was previously believed to have started in mid-March, found hospital records linking the virus to a household of 12 people of whom seven died in December.

George Romero's "The Crazies" (1973) has always existed in the shadow of his zombie movies, but this epidemic thriller is perhaps the horror maestro's most provocative exploration of his great theme: the collapse of social order. A new remake, directed by Breck Eisner and also titled "The Crazies," opens Friday; the original is being issued on Blu-ray by Blue Underground on Tuesday (it is already available on standard-definition DVD). Back in the crisis-ridden early '70s, the film's queasy premise must have carried more than a ring of real-world plausibility (as it certainly does in our jittery present of viral scares and terror threats)

After lying dormant for three years, the Ebola virus has resurfaced in Uganda, where 31 people have died from the deadly disease. The hemorrhagic virus, which kills with devastating speed, turned up two weeks ago in Gulu, 225 miles north of Kampala, the capital, health officials said. Among those who died were three student nurses who treated the first Ebola patients, the Ugandan Ministry of Health said. The last recorded outbreak was in Gabon in February 1997, when 10 people died.

The Ebola virus--widely feared because of its horrifying symptoms and lethal nature--may be on the verge of being tamed. Federal researchers report in today's Nature that they have devised a vaccine that fully protects monkeys against the virus--the first proof that vaccination against Ebola is possible in primates and a major step toward development of a vaccine for humans.

The deadly Ebola virus has struck two monkeys imported into Texas from the Philippines, federal health officials confirmed as they worked to contain the outbreak at a primate quarantine facility. Doctors have no reports of bites or scratches to monkey handlers at HRP Inc., in Alice, Texas, but are watching the employees carefully as a precaution, said state epidemiologist Dr. Diane Simpson. Federal experts diagnosed the illnesses as similar to the Ebola strain that decimated a Reston, Va.

More than 100 Ugandans who may have come into contact with the Ebola virus, which has has killed at least 129 people in Uganda in recent weeks, have been expelled, the Kenyan Health Ministry said Friday. The 137 Ugandans were in Kenya as delegates to a conference on regional security. They were put on buses, and police escorted them across the border Friday, said Amukowa Anangwe, Kenya's minister of health services. "Let me be very emphatic that none of the delegates here . . .

The Ebola virus that struck two monkeys at a research center in Texas is not the same strain that killed hundreds of people in Africa and poses virtually no threat to humans, health officials said Tuesday. "Nobody's sick. There's not a big outbreak of something," said Dr. Pierre Rollin, chief of the special pathogens branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Public health officials discounted any threat to humans as they euthanized 48 monkeys to contain an outbreak of the Ebola virus. One monkey had already died and another had been euthanized at the Texas Primate Center in Alice, which breeds primates for medical research. A third monkey diagnosed with the virus was being killed along with 47 others.

A researcher who had accidentally pricked her finger three weeks ago with a needle used to inject the deadly Ebola virus into mice was declared healthy and released from isolation at a German hospital Thursday, having been spared the horrific symptoms of the disease. It was not known if the virus actually entered her bloodstream, but she was given an experimental vaccine just in case. Scientists don't know if the vaccine saved her or if she was simply lucky enough not to get the disease.

Dr. William Close, a self-proclaimed country doctor who became the personal physician of Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko and played a key role in halting the 1976 outbreak of the lethal Ebola virus that terrified Zaire and surrounding countries, has died. He was 84. He died of a heart attack Jan. 15 at his home in Big Piney, Wyo., according to his daughter, actress Glenn Close.

Ebola, the mysterious virus responsible for periodic deadly outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever in Africa, may have an Achilles' heel, scientists at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla reported Thursday. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers revealed the shape of a protein that the virus uses to enter healthy cells, providing a possible target for drugs. Scientists also discovered some parts of the virus are similar in structure to parts of the HIV and Epstein-Barr virus, suggesting Ebola may help scientists understand why some diseases manage to avoid the body's defenses.

Uganda has 101 suspected cases of Ebola fever and hundreds more people being closely monitored, officials said Friday, as fear grew there and in neighboring countries that the deadly virus might spread. Twenty-two people have died of the fever, said Dr. Emmanuel Otaala, minister of state for primary healthcare, and 11 health workers have fallen sick.

Recent outbreaks of deadly Ebola among people in Africa also killed thousands of gorillas, animals already threatened by hunting, a new study reported Friday. Outbreaks in Congo and Gabon in 2002 and 2003 killed as many as 5,500 gorillas, a research team led by Magdalena Bermejo of the University of Barcelona in Spain reported in the journal Science. "Add commercial hunting to the mix, and we have a recipe for rapid ecological extinction," the researchers wrote.

The first vaccine designed to prevent infection with the lethal Ebola virus has passed initial safety tests in humans and has shown promising signs that it may indeed protect people from contracting the disease, government scientists reported. Just 21 people received the vaccine in this early-stage testing. Dr. Gary Nabel and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health's Vaccine Research Center developed a vaccine made of DNA strands that encoded three Ebola proteins.

Fear of contagion laced the grief of relatives who kept their death watch Friday in a cemetery where authorities handed over victims in coffins sealed to stop the spread of a dreaded virus. Two small boys in the crowd of about 50 people pulled T-shirts over their faces in a misguided attempt to protect themselves from the deadly Ebola virus that swept through Kikwit.

A team of federal disease detectives was dispatched to Zaire on Wednesday to investigate a deadly outbreak of what health officials strongly suspect is viral hemorrhagic fever--a devastating illness that can cause death within days by dissolving the body's organs.

Researchers working in Gabon and Congo have identified three species of fruit bat as the long-sought reservoirs of one of the deadliest known human pathogens, the Ebola virus. The team tested more than 1,000 bats and other animals before tracing the virus to fruit bats, which are commonly eaten by people in Central Africa, according to a report in today's issue of the journal Nature. Researchers found minute genetic traces of the virus in 22.6% of the bats tested.

U.S. and Canadian researchers have developed two vaccines that protect monkeys from the deadly Ebola and Marburg viruses, according to a study published Sunday. Because humans and monkeys have similar immune systems, researchers are optimistic the vaccines will work in humans, said Steven Jones, a researcher at the Public Health Agency of Canada in Winnipeg and coauthor of the study.