SARS Vaccine Developed

sbszine writes "Chinese scientists have successfully produced a SARS vaccine. In a clinical trial beginning in May, 36 volunteers were vaccinated. Most have now developed antibodies, and there have been no side effects reported. Slashdot covered the commencement of the clinical trial in an earlier story."

Comments

Medical research

[Will_Malverson]

Yeah, medical research is a lot easier when you don't have the liability concern of having to compensate patients for things that go wrong, and you don't have those silly western 'ethics' about doing tests on humans before doing animal tests and being ridiculously sure it's safe.

Am I being demeaningly sarcastic, or wistfully jealous? I'm not sure.

Re:Medical research

[Idarubicin]

... you don't have those silly western 'ethics' about doing tests on humans before doing animal tests and being ridiculously sure it's safe.

On the other hand, China was much harder hit by SARS than North America was. In the United States, there were only about thirty cases. If they're afraid that the next outbreak will infect millions of Chinese instead of thousands (with a fatality rate of more than ten percent), then yes--I can see it being sound policy to expedite vaccine development and testing. If there had been an outbreak of a novel disease in the United States that infected seven thousand people and killed seven hundred, I can see the FDA being pressured to rapidly approve trials, too.

Besides--they weren't testing vaccine efficacy by exposing people to the virus. They just tested the volunteers' blood for antibodies to SARS. This gives a pretty good indication that their immune system will respond to the virus without actually risking their health.

Meanwhile, the vaccine is probably made from recombinant protein that mimics the SARS virus' protein coat. Lacking the virus' genetic material, the vaccine cannot cause disease. The worst that is likely to happen would be an allergic reaction, but you can't eliminate that risk with animal testing--eventually you have to put it into a human and see what happens.

"Volunteers"?

[Paster Of Muppets]

So they actually got people to "volunteer" for this trial? Surely anybody who heard the (Western) news about SARS wouldn't have gone anywhere near something that stood a good chance of infecting them with it, so it begs the question (if they were "volunteers" and not "volunteered") of what has the Chinese Government released to its citizens about SARS?

Re:"Volunteers"?

[StuckInSyrup]

Nothing melodramatic about that. It's most probably a subunit vaccine (no infectious particles, just selected antigens), so there is no threat of infection from the vaccine. Today, most antiviral vaccines are of this type.

Definitely Jealous

[archnerd]

You don't often see a case in which China is freer than the West, but here it's true. In China, subjects are free to enter into clinical trials, by the mutual consent of the researcher and the subject, with full mutual understanding of the risks involved in doing so. It's a completely voluntary form of association (aside from possible cases where the Chinese government might force people into such tests, but that's not what I'm talking about). In the US we could never do such a thing, because either the FDA would interfere, or the lawyers would sue everybody into bankruptcy as soon as one of the subjects sneezed.

Zombies

[j0nb0y]

This is the one that's going to turn everyone into zombies, right?

But it only matters if...

[CodeWanker]

SARS doesn't mutate rapidly. That's why we have a different flu vaccine every year. New strains are always evolving. And remember the "crisis" we had this year with the vaccine? It's only a crisis if the World Health Organization guessed the right strain to innoculate against. Sometimes they don't. In which case, no amount of vaccine matters.