By Janis Siegel, Jewish Sound Correspondent
The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa is now epidemic, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev virologist Dr. Leslie Lobel told the Jewish Sound.
But what really worries the researcher, who has been working with three deadly viruses in Uganda for 12 years, is that the general public has forgotten what it’s like to contend with deadly diseases, like the Spanish flu and polio, which were epidemic in the U.S. during the 20th century.
An Ebola vaccine won’t be ready until mid-2015, when this current outbreak should most likely be dying down, said Lobel, who is on the faculty of health sciences in the department of Microbiology, Immunology and Genetics at BGU, but only after the use of strict quarantining, border control, and a great effort by the global medical community.
“The response is pathetic, I’m sorry,” said Lobel. “Even the American response has been pathetic. I’m quite shocked, actually. This is not the America that I remember.”
This Ebola outbreak, he said, is a “perfect storm” that should be our “wakeup call.”
“People should not become hysterical, but we have to get used to this,” said Lobel, whose work is dedicated to tracking and stopping the transmission of deadly viruses in Africa that he said are ever-present around the world.
“The notion that we’ve controlled infectious disease is a fallacy,” he said. “We haven’t. There was not an appropriate response at an earlier point in time and because of that it’s gotten out control.”
By 1970, most infectious diseases were effectively conquered, said Lobel, but “virulent diseases continue to replicate and emerge,” he said.
“What’s really scary to me, is that most people in the community now are under 50 years old and weren’t exposed to the ravages of deadly diseases,” said Lobel. “The generation today doesn’t understand deadly diseases.”
Lobel is critical of what he called the health establishment for largely ignoring infectious disease research in favor of studying “regenerative” diseases like stem cell and brain research.
“Universities refuse to hire any new infectious disease people,” he said. “It’s been gutted. The funding is not in infectious disease, but that’s the role of government.”
The first New York City resident and Ebola patient, Dr. Craig Spencer, who returned from treating Ebola patients in Africa and then lied to health authorities claiming he voluntarily self-quarantined, and Kaci Hickox, and the Ebola-treating nurse now threatening legal action against her home state of Maine rather than being quarantined after returning from Sierra Leone, demonstrate just how seriously some health officials are taking containment protocols.
“He should have been quarantined for three weeks in Africa before he came here,” said Lobel. “He shouldn’t have been allowed to come back to New York without documenting that he was Ebola-free.”
These breaches of basic health practices have admittedly left Lobel somewhat stunned.
“I don’t understand what’s going on there,” he said. “This is a failure of the system and I don’t know where. People are resistant to being controlled but freedom can lead to anarchy very easily. Freedom is a double-edged sword when it comes to infectious disease.”
Lobel collaborates with Dr. John M. Dye and his team at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, USAMRIID, and has several research projects underway, but he is mainly focused on the Marburg virus, the Ebola virus Sudan, and the Ebola virus Bundibugyo, the three viruses responsible for most of the outbreaks in central Africa, according to Lobel.
It is the Zaire strain of Ebola that is currently epidemic in West Africa.
Lobel and his team take blood samples from sick patients who have recovered, and isolate and clone certain antibodies from their blood in his labs.
Currently, this is experimental and can hopefully be used in future outbreaks in an effort to slow and eventually curtail the transmission of the virus.
“Having antibody cocktails for different deadly diseases is clearly the way to go moving forward,” said Lobel. “They could be used as treatments, too.”
Currently, the immunity provided by injecting antibodies is called passive vaccination, and only lasts for one to two months, said Lobel. However, the person gets “instant immunity.”
Active vaccines, like the ones we get to stave off the influenza virus, spur the body into producing its own immunity, said Lobel, for one to two years and up to 10 years, but it takes about a month for the body to develop full immunity.
“In an outbreak situation, antibodies clearly are better,” he said.
Eventually, this viral disease will burn itself out, said Lobel, and the surviving population will be left with what virologists call a “herd immunity” that will act as a buffer against future outbreaks of this Ebola strain.