Science

BBC   By Tulip Mazumdar                                                                                    Jan. 29, 2015

Scientists tracking the Ebola outbreak in Guinea say the virus has mutated.

Researchers at the Institut Pasteur in France, which first identified the outbreak last March, are investigating whether it could have become more contagious.

They are tracking how the virus is changing and trying to establish whether it's able to jump more easily from person to person

"We know the virus is changing quite a lot," said human geneticist Dr Anavaj Sakuntabhai.

It's not unusual for viruses to change over a period time. Ebola is an RNA virus - like HIV and influenza - which have a high rate of mutation. That makes the virus more able to adapt and raises the potential for it to become more contagious.

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http://www.bbc.com/news/health-31019097

MEDICAL NEWS TODAY                                             Jan. 22, 2015

Ebola is a "zoonotic" disease: the virus starts out in animal populations - believed to be fruit bats - and then spills over into humans. Now, a new study that investigates landscape features of where spillover occurs suggests human population density and vegetation cover may be important factors.

The study is the work of two researchers from SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, who write about their findings in the open-access journal PeerJ.

First author Michael G. Walsh, assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in SUNY Downstate's School of Public Health, says they found significant interaction between density of human populations and the extent of green vegetation cover in the parts of Africa that have seen outbreaks of Ebola virus disease (EVD).

NEW YORK TIMES by Andrew Pollack                               Jan. 23, 2015

As Ebola raged through West Africa last summer, an experimental drug was tried for the first time on two American aid workers in Liberia who were gravely ill with the virus. Both recovered, one of them rapidly.

Medicago, in North Carolina, is gearing up for possible production of the Ebola drug ZMapp using its plant-based technology. Credit Gerry Broome/Associated Press

Though it could not be said for sure that the drug, ZMapp, was responsible, patients and doctors began clamoring for it. But there was enough to treat only a handful of patients. Federal officials vowed to produce more.

MIT THE TECH  by Jennifer F. Switzer                         Jan. 14, 2015

CAMBRIDGE , MA-- At the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in a lab run by accomplished computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti ’97, researchers have collaborated with institutions in the U.S. and abroad to sequence and analyze more than 99 Ebola virus genomes collected by fellow scientists in Sierra Leone. They are on the lookout for mutations that could aid in developing new treatment options for Ebola, or that could serve as indications that the virus is evolving to become more deadly.

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http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N62/ebola.htm