In Brief:
You are lying in bed. You are dying and you know it.Looking around the hospital room, you see faces and you feel hands, cool hands in gloves wiping the blood from your eyes and your mouth. You are dying.If you find yourself in that condition, you may have contracted the deadly Ebola virus or its equally deadly cousin, the Marburg Virus.Lucky for you, if you have that condition and are in an American Hospital or a hospital in Europe, Asia or South America. Despite no traces of either virus the U.S. Department of Defense is treating both viruses as potential lethal weapons of bio-terrorisim that maybe unleashed on this country in the future by Al-Quaida, Iran, Pakistan or Agfhanistan.The department of defense, working through?a team of researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland, have been?injecting monkies with the deadly Ebola and Marburg viruses at the testing facility.In August, August 23 according to Reuters and the Associated Press, the Department of Defense notified the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that an anti-viral serum developed by a small biopharmaceutical company in Bothell, Washington was effective in keeping 63% of the monkies injected with Ebola alive and 100% of the monkies injected with Marburg alive.The Department of Defense requested that the Food and Drug Administration allow tests to begin on people contaminated with both viruses using AVI-6003 and Avi-6002, developed by AVI Biopharma of Bothell, Washington.This small bio-pharma company, founded in 1980, also released news on August 24 that its? experimental drug to treat the H1N1 Swineflu virus significantly reduced virus concentrations in ferrets. The company was awarded a $291 million contract with the Department of Defense for its development of the anti-viral drugs.Raymond Bulger
