An experimental Ebola vaccine tested on humans in the waning days of the West African epidemic has been shown to provide 100 percent protection against the lethal disease in a scientific triumph that will change the way the world fights a terrifying killer.
it is considered so effective that an emergency stockpile of 300,000 doses has already been created for use should an outbreak flare up again even though the vaccine has not yet been approved by any regulatory authority.
There have been many efforts to create a vaccine since Ebola was discovered in the former Zaire in 1976. All petered out for lack of money even as they began with a sense of urgency. The grotesque nature their deaths — copious hemorrhaging from every orifice — has lent the disease a frightening reputation although only about 1,600 people died of Ebola over those years.
Ultimately, the political and economic drive to make an effective vaccine was provided after the huge, explosive 2014 outbreak that took 11,000 lives in Africa and spread overseas, reaching a handful of people in Europe and the United States.
The test results of the trial in Guinea were released last Thursday in The Lancet.
The outbreak had probably began in a hollow, bat-filled tree in Guinea and swept Liberia and Sierra Leone before being defeated and the vaccine was not ready in time to stop the outbreak. But optimism among public health experts has spread by the prospect of a vaccine stockpile.
“While these compelling results come too late for those who lost their lives during West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, they show that when the next outbreak hits, we will not be defenseless,” said Marie-Paule Kieny, the World Health Organizations assistant director-general for health systems and innovation and the study’s lead author.
“The world can’t afford the confusion and human disaster that came with the last epidemic.”
New, faster, more efficient ways to encircle and strangle the virus is opened up b the vaccine. laborious methods: medical teams flew in, isolated the sick, and donned protective gear to treat them and bury the dead were the methods used to stop the many small Ebola outbreaks that occurred between 1976 and 2014 in remote villages.
But as the virus reached crowded capital cities, where it spread like wildfire and dead bodies piled up in the streets, that tactic failed in 2014.
Experts said that the new vaccine has some flaws. It may not give long-lasting protection and it appears to work only against one of the two most common strains of the Ebola virus. Side effects like joint pain and headaches were reported by some of those who get it.
“It’s certainly good news with regard to any new outbreak — and one will occur somewhere,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which makes many vaccines and did some early testing on this one. “But we still need to continue working on Ebola vaccines.”
11,841 residents of Guinea were the base of the Lancet study done last year. none came down with Ebola 10 or more days later among the 5,837 people who got the vaccine. There were 23 Ebola cases among the thousands of others not immediately vaccinated.
(Source:www.nytimes.com)
it is considered so effective that an emergency stockpile of 300,000 doses has already been created for use should an outbreak flare up again even though the vaccine has not yet been approved by any regulatory authority.
There have been many efforts to create a vaccine since Ebola was discovered in the former Zaire in 1976. All petered out for lack of money even as they began with a sense of urgency. The grotesque nature their deaths — copious hemorrhaging from every orifice — has lent the disease a frightening reputation although only about 1,600 people died of Ebola over those years.
Ultimately, the political and economic drive to make an effective vaccine was provided after the huge, explosive 2014 outbreak that took 11,000 lives in Africa and spread overseas, reaching a handful of people in Europe and the United States.
The test results of the trial in Guinea were released last Thursday in The Lancet.
The outbreak had probably began in a hollow, bat-filled tree in Guinea and swept Liberia and Sierra Leone before being defeated and the vaccine was not ready in time to stop the outbreak. But optimism among public health experts has spread by the prospect of a vaccine stockpile.
“While these compelling results come too late for those who lost their lives during West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, they show that when the next outbreak hits, we will not be defenseless,” said Marie-Paule Kieny, the World Health Organizations assistant director-general for health systems and innovation and the study’s lead author.
“The world can’t afford the confusion and human disaster that came with the last epidemic.”
New, faster, more efficient ways to encircle and strangle the virus is opened up b the vaccine. laborious methods: medical teams flew in, isolated the sick, and donned protective gear to treat them and bury the dead were the methods used to stop the many small Ebola outbreaks that occurred between 1976 and 2014 in remote villages.
But as the virus reached crowded capital cities, where it spread like wildfire and dead bodies piled up in the streets, that tactic failed in 2014.
Experts said that the new vaccine has some flaws. It may not give long-lasting protection and it appears to work only against one of the two most common strains of the Ebola virus. Side effects like joint pain and headaches were reported by some of those who get it.
“It’s certainly good news with regard to any new outbreak — and one will occur somewhere,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which makes many vaccines and did some early testing on this one. “But we still need to continue working on Ebola vaccines.”
11,841 residents of Guinea were the base of the Lancet study done last year. none came down with Ebola 10 or more days later among the 5,837 people who got the vaccine. There were 23 Ebola cases among the thousands of others not immediately vaccinated.
(Source:www.nytimes.com)
