And given that there is no present outbreak in Sub-Saharan Africa (all quiet there, thankfully), and it is a sunny, quiet Monday morning -- I decided to read up, a bit. This is very encouraging news, from The New England Journal of Medicine: in the daunting, generally non-sterilized environmental conditions that prevail in Équateur-, and Kinshasa- Province, Congo, a seven fold decrease in risk of death was seen in the most recent prior (eleventh) outbreak in Congo, for patients who could be reached with a complex cocktail of biological therapies (in truth, not entirely unlike the Regeneron and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics cocktail-based therapy given Tangerine, when he had an acute COVID bout at Walter Reed in 2020).
The Regeneron monoclonal antibodies approach does seem to work well against a widening array of viral outbreaks, from SARS to COVID to Ebola. That is very encouraging, even if the price point is fairly astronomical. Here is the March 2022 NEJM abstract:
. . .[T]he surveillance teams recorded 119 confirmed and 11 probable EVD cases in Équateur Province; 72 of the patients (55%) were male and 30 (23%) were 18 years of age or younger (Table 1). The mean (±SD) baseline nucleoprotein cycle-threshold value on polymerase-chain-reaction testing among the 117 patients with confirmed EVD was 27.0±3.5. A total of 20 patients (15%) reported previous receipt of the rVSVΔG-ZEBOV-GP vaccine. . . .
After written informed consent had been obtained, EVD-specific treatment was given to 32 patients with confirmed EVD under an expanded-access protocol approved by the ethics committee of the University of Kinshasa (17 patients received ansuvimab and 15 received REGN-EB3); 98 patients did not receive any EVD-specific treatment. In total, 55 deaths were recorded (42% of the patients). The percentage of patients who died was lower in the group that received EVD-specific treatment than in the group that did not receive such treatment (6% [95% confidence interval {CI}, 1 to 21] vs. 54% [95% CI, 44 to 64]). . . .
The data is embedded in the image at right. Click to enlarge if you like. But this is an extraordinary moment in human history -- we are lucky to be alive to witness it -- as bit by bit, the curtain is being drawn back, in our expanding understanding of how naturally occurring human proteins may be the best route to blunting dangers to cells of all sorts, from viral loads to cancers. Onward, smiling widely, now. . . . be excellent to one another. . . as a butterfly takes wing. . . under a bridge on the Chicago River, at Michigan Avenue. . . this morning, and just nine years ago, on that fateful morning.
नमस्ते
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