Ebola cure: Beer brewing and tobacco could hold the key

AS Ebola spreads around the world with all the spectre of a Hollywood movie plot scientists are working furiously on possible treatments and vaccines to stop the killer virus.
And, bizarrely, the much maligned tobacco leaf and beer could hold the key to beating the disease that has claimed over 3,400 lives and is forecast to infect 1.4 million by January.
Tobacco is normally regarded as a scourge in healthcare but the tobacco leaf is needed to grow the most promising of all the Ebola treatments, the ZMAPP medicine.
ZMAPP has already been used on seven humans with the virus in the current Ebola outbreak including US missionary Dr Kent Brantly.
It is made by infecting tobacco leaves with a genetically engineered virus that contains in instructions to make three antibodies to Ebola. All of the 18 monkeys infected with Ebola and treated with ZMAPP in a trial survived and five of the seven humans who’ve used the drug lived.

news.com.au

Posted by admin on Oct 17 2014. Filed under Community News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry