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Ebola Vaccines Successfully Tested on Monkeys
An Anonymous Reader writes "Canadian and American researchers, in a joint venture between Canada's National Microbiology Lab and the U.S. military, have created two vaccines that prevent Monkeys from becoming ill with Ebola and Marburg. While a human vaccine may still be 5 years away, this is very promising news.
Well, the good thing is that they have a potential vaccine.
The downside is that, just like with most other vaccines, they will not distribute it to everyone everywhere. It simply isn't affordable. And once youcome in contact with it, the vaccine isn't going to do you a damn bit of good.
I don't see how an ebola vaccine is of any use, other than to vaccinate people just before they go to regions which are currently experiencing an ebola outbreak and the person being vaccinated will be directly in contact with those suffering from the outbreak.
Epidemics are like fires. The ones that burn really fast consume their fuel too quickly and then die out.
Ebola is probably not really a virus well adapted to humans. At any given time the chance that there is nobody in the world sick with it is quite high, youonly hear about sporadic outbreaks once in a while (maybe 8 times or soo in 20 years if I recall). Marburg is even rarer. So the virus lives in other organisms and once in a while it accidentally reaches humans kills of a few hundred and then the infection dies out in a month. This is not good for the long time suvival of the virus itself, which is what the virus wants to achieve.
That said, HIV was for many years a Simian virus and somewhere in the 1960's adapted to Homo Sapiens. But HIV (and influenza's) trick is that you can carry it and be contagious WITHOUT dying for a long time. Ebola is not like that, as far as we know. So from an epidemical point of view the virus is a minor nuisance.
The big thing about Ebola is the gruesome way in which people die, which makes for great headlines in the tabloid press, and the fact that it suddenly appeared from nowhere in 1976 and tht certainly added to the fear factor. HIV also suddenly appeared from nowehre in about 1980, but it does not dissolve the flesh of its victims so nobody cared for along time, and, in fact, nobody knew it existed for quite a while.
Read "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garrett sometime. Its an amazing book.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
You know, a working vaccine could make ebola more dangerous. After all if you could immunise all your agents against it, and then gave them little aerosol sprayer packs full of it, you could get them to walk like the angels of death through a city cutting down people left and right.