Ebola Vaccination in Africa: The Importance of the Emergence of Multiple Pseudo-Atmospheric Variants

Ebola viruses don’t mutate nearly as fast as coronaviruses, so constant evolution of immune-evading variants is less of a concern, Pardi says. It is not clear if a single shot of the messenger muscial fluid will be enough to protect against the spread of the disease. It is important for the vaccine to be kept in cold conditions because it can cause difficulties in distribution.

“Public health in Africa would benefit from further options,” says Heinz Feldmann, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Laboratory of Virology in Hamilton, Montana, whose research contributed to the development of the existing Ebola vaccines.

It would be ideal to have a vaccine that confers protection against multiple filoviruses — the family that includes Ebola virus and other pathogens that cause haemorrhagic diseases, such as Marburg virus — rather than having many separate vaccines, says Alex Bukreyev, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. This would make vaccine distribution easier in poor and rural areas, because costly new vaccination campaigns wouldn’t be needed with every outbreak of a different Ebola species.

The technology that the vaccines use limits the number of people who can receive them. In most circumstances, Ervebo is approved for use only in people over 18 — and its side effects can be unpleasant. Johnson & Johnson’s regimen can be offered to people one year old and up, but it must be given in two doses, eight weeks apart, which is not ideal in a rapidly growing outbreak, Bukreyev says.

Bukreyev, who worked with Moderna on the study, says that if the deal goes through, it will probably take about three years of research in non-human primates to find out whether the vaccine is effective in the animals, and then human clinical trials will be needed.

Climate Change and the Sustainable Growth of the World: A Briefing on Climate Change, Climate, Health, Ecology and the Scientific Impact of Heat Waves

An analysis of the economic consequences of heatwaves estimates that the global economy lost between US$5 trillion and $29 trillion from 1992 to 2013, as a result of human-driven global warming. The effect was worst in low-income tropical nations, leading to a 6.7% reduction in their national income on average. The countries with the highest income levels experienced a small decrease.

I’ll be at COP27 in Egypt as part of the Nature News team covering the event. We would like to hear your views about climate change, the summit and how science plays into the political process. Our coverage might be influenced by your comments. Please e-mail me at at [email protected].

World leaders are converging on the idea that it’s time to stop using gross domestic product (GDP) as the world’s main measure of prosperity. Instead, we could complement it with a dashboard of indicators on the economy, health, ecosystems, climate and more. If this happens, it would be the biggest shift in how economies are measured since nations first started using GDP in 1953, almost 70 years ago. “Absurdly, GDP rises when there is overfishing, cutting of forests or burning of fossil fuels,” wrote UN secretary-general António Guterres in 2021. We count nature as an increase in wealth despite the fact that we are destroying it.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03661-0

Huxley, the Biochemist, and the Human Immune System: A Conversation with Thomas H. Bashford at the University of Pennsylvania

The United States has long been a top destination for international early-career researchers to do their PhD or Postdoc training. The researchers spoke to Nature and said they didn’t want to go to the United States because of affordability, visa issues, racism and gun violence.

The Huxley family was vexed in its influence on science and society. The intergenerational study involves the central figures from the 19th century, including Thomas Henry Huxley, an early promoter of Darwin and his grandson, and the evolutionary biologist who in 1942 codified the modern evolutionary synthesis by combining population genetics, inheritance and natural selection. Bashford thinks they may be thought of as one long-lived man because of the similarities between the two.

Weissman attended Boston University where he received a doctor of medicine degree as well as a PhD from the school. He eventually landed a fellowship in Dr. Anthony Fauci’s lab at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, where he spent the better part of the ’90s researching dendritic cells, a key biological player in starting the body’s immune response. When he arrived at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, he was faced with the question of how to bolster the human immune system.

Coincidentally, it came in. Weissman was waiting to take his articles to the Xerox machine to be photocopied when he bumped into the biochemist, who is also a university professor. They talked about their research interests. Karikó, a native of Hungary, had spent decades researching messenger RNA – the biological instruction manual for the production of proteins in human cells – and was convinced of the potential it held for human therapeutics.

Weissman: The biggest problem is social media distortion of what RNA is and what it can do. People don’t want to take a RNA therapy because of misinformation. I can’t tell you how many times a week I hear people say, “Oh, I won’t take the vaccine, it’ll make me sterile, it’ll give me cancer, it’ll change my genes.” All of that is absolute nonsense, and I think it’s important for scientists to let people know that it’s nonsense – that RNA is safe.

Millions of lives have been saved because of the vaccines. The Americans that were boosted have been able to return to a normal life after getting Covid-19.

CNN asked about China’s zero Covid approach. Is it true that China did its citizens a disservice by not making the vaccines available to them?

The vaccine supplies the codes for part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The body’s immune system sees the ribosomes read the mRNA vaccine code and create the spikeProtein from it. The body will be able to build up its own resistance to the real virus if it is ever introduced into the system.

I was wondering if we were also able to deliver both vaccine and therapy with the same amount ofRNA. There were so many potential drawbacks that we thought they needed to be addressed. And that’s why we stuck with it for so many years.

I’m also speaking with institutions that treat genetic diseases that afflict only 200 people. There is only a small population of people affected and no pharmaceutical company is interested in researching them. But there is potential for RNA to be the key to treatment of these diseases because instead of having to reinvent the gene therapy for each disease, we can use the RNA platform we’ve already developed and easily plug in different diseases. We don’t need to spend a lot to find a new treatment.

Weissman: We need to develop the infrastructure to make new medicines, new vaccines, new therapies available to the world. I’ve been working with a lot of low- and middle-income countries to help them develop RNA therapeutics. Take Thailand. Through support from its government and charitable donations, Thailand was able to fund the development of an mRNA vaccine, which is currently in clinical trials, and could be distributed through Southeast Asia.

Weissman: No, there’s a new institute at the University of Pennsylvania. There are some diseases, particularly muscular diseases, that are caused by incorrect splicing of our RNA. So, we’re looking at new therapies to correct that splicing problem, which use different types of RNA.

Science Isn’t the enemy. Scientists should stop lying to politicians and church leaders: The problem of scientific honesty and the failure of science

There are lots of ways to address that problem. Scientists aren’t vocal enough about science. Some of our far right-wing politicians, religious leaders and community leaders are helping to build a thriving group of people who think scientists are all frauds and don’t believe in science. We need to get to those leaders and tell them to stop creating this unwarranted fear. We need to tell them that science isn’t the enemy.