ViroBlogy

Browsing through my own web pages in an effort to clean up dead-end links, and cull tired material, I discovered that my link to an essay I wrote 19 years ago was still live – and as it referred to something written in and put up on our nascent Web server in 1994, means it has a 20-year anniversary round about now.

My essay is

The Student, the Web and the Ebola Connection

or:

“Dr Jacobson, are you going to Kikwit?”

…and it is a record of events that resulted in 1994 from (a) an Honours student essay being written on “Emerging Viruses”, and (b) me playing around with the then-very-new WWW server that UCT has enabled – but didn’t tell anyone about, because they didn’t want anyone to use it until they had sorted out policies.  Oh, and (c) – the Kikwit Ebola outbreak in 1995.

I wrote in 1995:

“The whole phenomenon has been an object exercise in the power of the Web as a tool for the wide dissemination of information: we reached not only professional virologists, but also health-care professionals, and – most importantly – the lay public on a large scale”

And of course, this is even more true now – which is why, following the benign guidance of The Guru Cann, I maintain ViroBlogy and Virology News, and heartily recommend a Web presence to anyone who feels they need to disseminate information on topics of specialist and generalist interest to the world at large.

Of course, nearly all the links out of that essay are now dead – including to the original essay, that for a while there in 1995 was the ONLY detailed information on Ebola available on the Web.  So here is Alison Jacobson’s original essay, in full, revealed by going to my teaching material and checking out essays from 1997 and thereabouts:

EMERGING AND RE-EMERGING VIRUSES: AN ESSAY

Of course, I also maintained a daily update on the Kikwit outbreak, and then a couple of the next ones, before the Web caught up with me and it became easier to just trawl it for news via Google and its predecessors.  It still makes interesting reading, though, to go through some of what was posted from the disease frontlines back in the 1990s – and to remember that I had the TIME to do that kind of thing!

Where we are now

Well, here we are with what is the worst outbreak of Ebola in history, and here am I – again – trying to keep up with it.  This time, by the very excellent medium of the Web news aggregator Scoop.it, where I have established Virology News as a means of quickly and easily getting news out to the public.  Again, following the very excellent example of TGC, but also Chris Upton, who babied me along by letting me co-curate his Virology and Bioinformatics site.

Of course, there is a new angle to this outbreak – and that has been the compassionate use of a plant-made monoclonal antibody cocktail (ZMapp), hitherto only tested preclinically in a primate model.  Fortuitously, this all happened while I was finishing off a review on plant-made viral vaccines, so I reported on it – with references – here on ViroBlogy.

I was also able to report on it in my Plant Molecular Farming news site, with some authoritative statements from pioneers of the technology: Charles Arntzen from the Arizona Biodesign Institute sent through a link for an interview he did, and CNN covered it quite well too.  Charlie also sent through a set of links in an email that he was happy to share:

“The original story

There is a lot of interest from the press in “why tobacco” and “how does it work”?

The other focus is on the politics of scale up of the drug — it seems that criticism of the US is mounting in some sectors of Africa, and elsewhere.   I talked to a Spanish Language radio news station this morning, and the main questions related to “why is this a Secret Drug; are you trying to hide the secret from the world?”    “Is Reynolds tobacco trying to stop the supply of this drug to Africans?”    One guy asked if it was true that the Ebola Virus had been created in a test tube.

It seems that the press is largely to blame for using terms like Secret Drug.   It appears that they are also trying to mount political pressure to make a lot more of the drug to help Africans.   [This was] a nice job answering some of this….”

And at time of writing, the outbreak was still raging, had spread to Nigeria, and airlines were banning travel to half of West Africa – and alarmist tourist firms were advising people not to come to South and East Africa, as well.  The WHO has also said the impact is probably much greater than reported.

And Alison Jacobson is alive and well, and NOT working in virology any more.  Sadly!

This entry was posted on 25 August, 2014 at 12:12 and is filed under biofarming, biotechnology, Ebola, Evolution, General Virology, Vaccines: General, Viruses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.