Treatment
There is currently no FDA-approved ebolavirus-specific therapy for EVD. Treatment is primarily supportive in nature and includes minimizing invasive procedures, balancing fluids and electrolytes to counter dehydration, administration of anticoagulants early in infection to prevent or control disseminated intravascular coagulation, administration of procoagulants late in infection to control hemorrhaging, maintaining oxygen levels, pain management, and administration of antibiotics or antimycotics to treat secondary infections. Hyperimmune equine immunoglobulin raised against EBOV has been used in Russia to treat a laboratory worker who accidentally infected herself with EBOV—but the patient died anyway. Experimentally, recombinant vesicular stomatitis Indiana virus (VSIV) expressing the glycoprotein of EBOV or SUDV has been used successfully in nonhuman primate models as post-exposure prophylaxis. Such a recombinant post-exposure vaccine was also used to treat a German researcher who accidentally pricked herself with a possibly EBOV-contaminated needle. Treatment might have been successful as she survived. However, actual EBOV infection could never be demonstrated without a doubt. Novel, very promising, experimental therapeutic regimens rely on antisense technology. Both small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers (PMOs) targeting the EBOV genome could prevent disease in nonhuman primates.
Read more about this topic: Ebola Virus Disease
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“To me, nothing can be more important than giving children books, It’s better to be giving books to children than drug treatment to them when they’re 15 years old. Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn’t have to put them in prisons?”
—Fran Lebowitz (20th century)
“I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts.... The question “Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?” should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)