Dear Bill Gates, thank you for putting up 5.7 million dollars for research toward finding a treatment for Ebola. This disease potentially threatens the whole world. While everyone applauds your concern and financial contribution, a closer look suggests you might have leveraged your investment better. Potential Ebola treatments are like start-up companies. It would be better to spread your bets to see which potential therapeutic approaches have their science in order, have power against this disease, and are cost effective.   First analyze your current bet on plasma antibody transfer, or “PAT”. Antibodies are produced by immune system B-cells to attack bacteria, virus or fungi that cause disease. Once the body has recovered from a disease, memory B-cells are primed to produce millions of antibodies specific for that particular disease in case that same germ ever attacks again. B-cells and the antibodies they produce are a key ...

               “THERE IS NO TREATMENT, THERE IS NO CURE” …well, that is not entirely true.             The heroic organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the physicians at other Ebola treatment units (ETUs) in West Africa provide a minimal form of treatment called “supportive care” for patients with Ebola virus disease (EVD). This includes keeping patients hydrated with water containing electrolytes, giving antibiotic drugs to help prevent secondary infections, painkillers and antimalarial drugs. This increases an Ebola patient’s chance of survival from only 10% in the absence of such care, to an average of 45%. But basic supportive care does not include any drug therapy targeted directly at the virus itself – no antiviral medication.                Two days after I arrived in Monrovia, Liberia from South Africa for the s...

 I started smoking when I wasn’t quite fourteen and puffed cigarettes for twenty years. I finally quit just months after finding out I was HIV positive because studies showed smoking was linked with faster progression of HIV disease to Aids. I grew up in southern Virginia tobacco country. The small, enterprising town of South Hill was the third largest tobacco market in the state with five huge competing warehouses. Farmers from surrounding counties who were luckily enough to have government allocated rights to raise a few acres of the valuable crop brought their flue-cured tobacco to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Their bundled and graded golden brown leaf was then shipped off to Richmond for manufacturing into cigarettes in the factories lining the bluffs above the James River. Queen Elizabeth’s friend Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the Virginia Indian habit of smoking tobacco in long clay pipes to London about 1600. Much to the annoyance of the social critics of the day,...