Ebola disease
A visiting biologist at the University of California, San Diego and her colleagues in Africa and Britain have shown that there are close linkages between outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in human and wildlife populations, and that climate may influence the spread of the disease.
Researchers in the Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Caribbean Primate Research Center have discovered a key mechanism by which the Filoviruses, Ebola and Marburg, cause disease. The identification of an amino acid sequence in Filoviruses that results in the rapid depression of immunological response is described in the December 2006 issue of The FASEB Journal. Using this information, researchers can begin to develop new drugs to stop these devastating diseases.
Ebola virus reproduction in laboratory-grown cells is severely hampered by enzyme-inhibiting chemicals, and these chemicals deserve further study as possible treatments for Ebola virus infections in humans, report scientists supported in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).