We managed to survive Ebola without having ISIS turn it into a spray gun weapon. Medical science seems to have turned HIV into a chronic illness instead of a death sentence. Those terrifying outbreaks of bubonic plague never spread around the country.
Just when we thought were getting safer, along comes another horrific disease to keep us up at night. Get ready for “Argentine Hemorrhagic Fever“. Yup. Hemorrhagic, just like Ebola. One of those diseases that causes its victims to bleed out of every opening and to die in horrific pain.
This disease, which is caused by a virus with the lyrical name “Junin”, is spread through contact with rodent urine. Yuck. What makes it particularly scary is the fact that it is on the government’s bioterror list. That means that it could potentially be made into a weapon, and could be spread throughout the population. Scary, don’t you think?
Luckily, scientists have been working to find a cure for the disease. The current treatment is a blood transfusion from someone who has survived the illness and who therefore has the necessary antibodies to defeat it. This approach works now, when the illness is confined to a rural part of Argentina. But can you imagine a major outbreak, like the one that took place with the similar Ebola virus? If the only way to get well is to get blood from a survivor, it’s pretty clear that doctors will quickly run out of an antibody supply.
This is when the good news come in. Doctors at Mapp Biopharmaceutical in San Diego have been working on a drug to treat the disease. The drug has been dubbed J199 and uses the same type of antibody approach that is gained through the blood transfusions.
The drug is still far from human trials, but it is at least encouraging to know that there are scientists out there working to head off a weaponized spray of deadly fevers if one ever gets into the wrong hands.
Featured image by Umberto Salvagnin via Flickr. Available through a Creative Commons 2.0 license.
