Dr. Karl Brantly and Nancy Writebol were working at a hospital in Liberia, where it is believed they contracted the deadly Ebola virus - responsible for 961 deaths during the current outbreak, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) as of August 6th.
One of the world's most infectious diseases, Ebola has a case fatality rate of around 90% and is characterized by the abrupt onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat.
At present, treatment for the disease is limited to intensive supportive care. However, the missionaries were offered the opportunity to be given ZMapp - an experimental drug that had previously only been tested on monkeys - and it looks as though the treatment may have saved their lives.
Dr. Scott Podolsky, associate professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has written in the Annals of Internal Medicine that ZMapp has much in common with methods of treating illness that were being developed toward the end of the 19th century.
History repeating itself?
The experimental combination of pre-formed monoclonal antibodies given to the two American missionaries is one of several potential Ebola treatments that are currently being developed.
ZMapp is a three-mouse monoclonal antibody; it was made by collecting the antibodies created in the blood of mice after exposing them to fragments of the Ebola virus. Podolsky writes that this method mirrors that of passive serotherapy that was developed over a century ago.
The methodology, he writes, first began to be developed following the discoveries of microbiologists Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, who started to identify the agents of diseases such as anthrax, diphtheria and pneumonia.
By 1890, humoral factors were then discovered in infected animals that could be transferred into laboratory animals to protect them from the toxins of diphtheria and tetanus.
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