Halloween Mini Microbe Box – $24.95

Forget ghouls and goblins! Nothing screams happy Halloween like a Jack o’ Lantern shaped box filled with scary microbes from the NeatoShop.  The Halloween Mini Microbe Box contains 5 fabulously costumed mini microbe plush toys:

• Anthrax in a witch’s hat
• Flesh eating disease in vampire fangs
• Amoeba in a black mask
• Black death is embroidered with skull and crossbones
• And  Ebola is adorned with neck bolts

Limited supply available. Get your Halloween Mini Microbe Box today.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more  Giant Microbe or Halloween fun!

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Seven of the nine monkeys in the study received the same amount of the drug over a six-day period. Three of the seven monkeys got the drug every other day, while four received it daily. One monkey in each group served as a control animal and didn’t receive the drug.

Analysis of the treated monkeys revealed that, ten days after having been infected with Ebola, the first group of monkeys had very low levels of the virus in their blood. Researchers were unable to detect the virus at all in the group that had received daily doses.

“The siRNAs inhibited the replication of the virus and completely protected the monkeys against death from hemorrhagic fever,” Geisbert noted. “This has never been done before.”

Link | Image (unrelated): CDC | Previously: A Vaccine for the Ebola Virus?

Because Ebola virus is so dangerous, producing and testing a vaccine is extremely challenging for the scientists. One significant factor slowing down progress has been that there are only a very limited number of high containment facilities with staff capable and authorised to conduct the research.

“Ebola virus is a Biosafety Level 4 threat, along with many other haemorrhagic fever viruses”, says Dr Sanchez. “As well as the difficulty in getting the right staff and facilities, vaccines for viruses like Ebola, Marburg and Lassa fever have been difficult to produce because simple ‘killed’ viruses that just trigger an antibody response from the blood are not effective. For these viruses we need to get a cell-mediated response, which involves our bodies producing killer T-cells before immunity is strong enough to prevent or clear an infection.”

The researchers have now used several different recombinant DNA techniques, which have allowed them to trigger a cell-mediated response and produce a vaccine that is effective in non-human primates. One of the candidate vaccines is about to be tested on people for the first time, after entering Phase 1 clinical trials in autumn 2006.

I’m old enough to still remember the early 90s, when movies like Outbreak and books like The Hot Zone had a firm grip on the popular imagination. There was a mystique about these deadly diseases that people just found utterly compelling. I can’t really speculate why, except to say that that maybe it’s the same reason people find serial killers compelling too: We long to know why/how they do what they do. But, like serial killers, we’ll probably never understand any of them completely. We just need to be able to stop them.

Here’s wishing Dr. Sanchez good luck at the CDC today, where he’ll be presenting Ebola vaccine developments!

Link – via Digg