We had a nice meetup talking about Ebola here at Counter Culture Labs last week (recording coming...), and I know La Paillasse in Paris is really interested in the topic as well.
-- Last week, President Obama announced a Grand Challenge for Development on Fighting Ebola:
So, how can we as DIYbio community contribute to the fight?
- Protective equipment is a huge issue, with health workers needing to wear head-to-toe protective suits in 100+ F heat all day long. Can we learn anything from how sports mascot suits are constructed with built-in ventilation, for example? Just a wild idea...
- They seem to be wearing isolation suits designed to protect against aerosols, but Ebola is not aerosol transmitted. Can the suits be simplified, so health workers no longer need to choose between dying of heat exhaustion of infection.
- Taking *off* those protective suits turns out to be a major source of infections for hospital personnel. Could they be redesigned to be more inherently safe to take off? NASA's new Z-1 Z-1 space suit has a hatch on the back that allows the suit to dock with a portal on a spacecraft or rover so an astronaut can crawl through without letting dust in or air out. Probably overkill, but perhaps there's something to treating the entire suit as a "glove" that you can take off. Does anyone have access to design info on the current suits, and maybe a video showing how to put them on & take them off?
- There are at least 99 viral genomes available from just the current epidemic, containing hundreds of mutations for which we have no clue what (if anything) they do. Can we learn anything about those by studying them computationally? How about experimentally (preferably without tripping all sorts of alarms by ordering Ebola genes to be DNA synthesized!)
Discuss!
Patrik
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