Just in case anyone is curious, here is the actual paper: http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...

Neither the summary or the linked article use the term, but what they're using is known as "convalescent serum". As the parent poster stated above, it's been in use for over a century now, but has only fallen out of fashion in modern times -- mainly because it has been superseded by vaccines and anti-infectives that are cheaper, more reliable, more convenient, and easier to mass-produce.

Trivia note: While Type-O may be the universal blood donor, the ideal serum donor is Type AB.

It's not used much today, because we've largely conquered the disease agents that such an approach works against. Typically, it works well against infectious agents which are highly vulnerable to a Humoral (antibody-mediated) immune response. Co-incidentally, this also means most vaccines work extremely well against those same disease agents. Unfortunately, Ebola doesn't yet have a commercially available vaccine, but I would expect such a vaccine to work well.

There are only a few examples in the West where we still use this approach -- one that I can think of, is the use of anti-HepB sera in infants born to infected mothers, and for emergency prophylaxis of needlestick injuries involving Hepatitis B exposure. For the bulk of the population, Hepatitis B vaccination works well enough (and is far cheaper).

What it doesn't work well against, are infectious agents that don't respond well to natural antibody defenses. For instance, most anti-HIV antibodies do not defend well against HIV, anti-HepC antibodies do not protect against Hepatitis C, nor do anti-TB antibodies protect against Tuberculosis. For those agents, an effective response depends on cell-mediated immunity.

If you follow the money, it'll lead back to a grant funded by the Federal government (in this case, both the U.S. and Canadian governments).

Ebola therapeutics were (and probably still are) anticipated to be a profit-less product segment, as far as the civilian commercial market is concerned. The affected population can't afford any resulting product, plus previous outbreaks were sporadic with small numbers of fatalities. The only potential "customers" -- at the time research was initiated over a decade ago -- were governments who might be interested in stockpiling treatments for future bio-defense use.

Now, a few of the large pharmaceutical companies still maintain and fund tropical-diseases divisions, despite the lack of profitability (for instance, Glaxo's division is largely a legacy of British Colonial days, which they've carried ever since). But I highly doubt a small biotech like Mapp Biopharm would ever do so without being paid most of the cost up-front.

That's actually pretty generous. Usually I hear 4chan referred to in the context of it being another kind of "hole" of the internet.

I wouldn't be surprised if they are. Of course, they are likely also anticipating that long-term, the flow of cash will turn the other way around.

As time go on, this will even out. While the ranks of older physicians are male-dominated, females make up just slightly under half the medical school class in the US. In parts of Europe, they already make up the majority:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...

In 2011-2012, women represented 47.0% of entering students entering medical school, and it's been hovering at just below half (around 47-49%) for the past decade. This value has also been approximately proportional to the gender mix of applicants, which was 47.3% female in 2011-2012.

Source: https://www.aamc.org/download/...

Oh, here it is: Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes reveal seals as a source of New World human tuberculosis (Paywall -- free Nature summary article here).

While the clinical picture and timing suggests the possibility, it's far from certain that this was a primary infection stemming from his home fecal transplant. I would have liked to see an analysis of anti-CMV IgM titers, although in this case it's also possible that his case was recognized too long afterwards to determine whether or not it was an actual primary infection.

Well, there are tons of trolls on SA. They just spend their time trolling other sites.

Don't forget the mercury output as well. It's largely thanks to coal that a few pounds of swordfish steaks now contain (on average) as much mercury as a typical CFL bulb, and the level of mercury in our oceans continues to slowly increase over time.

No problem with atomic size limits, let me just whip out my handy quark notcher!

I think there was some specialty lens company that sold a multi-layer achromatic eyeglass lens, but I believe they have since gone out of business, unfortunately.

The best commonly available material for chromatic dispersion is probably CR-39, followed by Trivex, but the index is too low for very high-powered prescriptions.

That reminds me, one of the best things you can do for a home router is to put it behind a UPS. I put my father's Linksys wrt54g behind an old APC-300, it was up for over a year continuously afterwards, and only required a reboot when I had to move it around for some maintenance. Even a crappy $25 Belkin can be surprisingly stable when it has a nice clean power supply.