The Ebola Strain Links African Outbreak To A Lab Escape

As newly arrived patients are treated at US hospitals in Atlanta and New York, the most alarming aspect of the spreading Ebola outbreak across four West African countries is the strain’s probable origin as an escapee from a medical-research laboratory.

As early as May, a prophetic warning came from Heinz Feldman, former head of the Canadian laboratory that created the ZMapp drug-cocktail used to treat missionary doctors Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol. Now serving as chief virologist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana, Feldman has urged a halt to international shipments of infected tissue and pressed for the formation of secure national laboratories in every country to handle samples of contagious pathogens (The New England Journal of Medicine).

The virologist, who provided medical aid to Sierra Leone, disclosed that it requires a 14-day period between shipping a medical sample from Liberia, hub of the pandemic, to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, before receiving a diagnosis. In the interval, physicians depend only physical symptoms as an indicator of the specific disease affecting patients, most of whom suffer multiple diseases and chronic disorders. The delay can be fatal to other patients and medical staff in cases of ebola virus infection.

Besides the long delays in a limbo of uncertainty, another potential problem is the mishandling of medical samples from clinics in isolated villages via informal transport networks of visiting doctors and couriers sent to the air-cargo offices. The odds of a medical technician or deliveryman accidentally breaking a container and self-infecting are not improbable, and in rebellion-torn regions like western Africa a small package en route can easily fall into the hands of marauding bands of rebels or criminal elements. The risks of inadvertent infection are unacceptably high.

Inefficient transport of medical samples could explain why the current Western African outbreak is not of the endemic (local-originated ) variant Ivory Coast ebola (EBO-C1). Instead, the now-prevalent virus is the foreign ZEBOV, or Zaire ebola, the most virulent of the four types of this pathogen.

In the 1990s, ZEBOV-infected parts of Zaire, since renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), were quarantined inside a World Health Organization (WHO) cordon, under a decontamination campaign that led to the chemical-spraying or burning down of entire villages. Since that horrific containment program in remote Central Africa, a rural area with few roads or communications links, the Zaire stain has been suppressed due to close monitoring by health authorities, border police and immigration officials.

How one of the deadliest viral strains in human history could have jumped a distance of 4,000 kilometers undetected from Central to West Africa defies logic. Retracing its path will be difficult to track down when West African medical personnel are overwhelmed with new cases while foreign physicians and non-governmental groups flee the region. The challenge of retracing Zaire ebola is compounded by the recent death of epidemiologist Sheik Humarr Khan, one of the continent’s top field doctors who was posted at Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone.

As a stern precedent, the 2002 SARS outbreak in Hong Kong started with just one infected guest at the Metropole Hotel but quickly led to a wave of infections inside city hospitals and a WHO-imposed 6-month travel ban to the island. The arrival of an infected passenger at JFK Airport, New York, raises the threat of a similar public-health crisis across North America.

Bush’s Project BioShield

The chaos, delays and atmosphere of secrecy surrounding and undermining the global fight against contagious diseases is largely due to anti-terrorism concerns in the United States in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks after 911. In response to the mailings of “white powder” envelopes to Congress, the White House and federal agencies, President George W. Bush authorized Project BioShield as an integral part of his war on terrorism.

The ill-defined but sweeping BioShield program led to a bureaucratic consolidation of all related medical research under the Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which handles many other issues ranging from aircraft safety and controls over explosives.

In a parallel extension of national security, the microbiology of infectious diseases was reclassified by the Pentagon as “biological-warfare countermeasures”, under the supervision of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (AMRAIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Md., home of military Walter Reed Hospital.

Defense Contractors Go Viral

Under an R&D “outsourcing” policy similar to the deployment of defense contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, theDefense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), based at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, has dispensed multimillion-dollar research contracts to large pharmaceuticals like GlaxoSmithKline and Rothschild-owned Sanofi, as well as smaller “favorite son” contractors with insider connections to the Defense Department or the CIA, including Mapp Biopharmaceutical based in San Diego.

The smaller biotech start-ups like Mapp are usually run by younger hotshot researchers out for fame and instant riches that come from playing fast-and-loose with biochemistry and medical ethics. Proprietary tussles with patent holders, rushed and sloppy lab procedures, budgetary corner-cutting, a competitive drive against more cautious labs, and executive misappropriation of grant monies can end up with the doctoring of lab results and other serious lapses.

Prior to the much-publicized single dose was donated to Dr. Brantly in Sierra Leone, two of the three antibodies in ZMapp drug cocktail had never been tested in macaque monkeys, much less in clinical trials with human patients. Tests in mice alone are inadequate and seriously unethical since small rodents have entirely different immune responses from humans to blood coagulation and lymph disorders. The sole “proof” of ZMapp’s efficacy and lack of side effects is the company’s own claims. Treatment without testing is reckless.

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