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Ebola Vaccine Passes Initial Human Tests
An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com has an article about the first successful tests of an Ebola vaccine on human subjects." From the article: "Nabel and colleagues at the NIH's Vaccine Research Center developed a vaccine made of DNA strands that encode three Ebola proteins. They boosted that vaccine with a weakened cold-related virus, and the combination protected monkeys exposed to Ebola. The first human testing looked just at the vaccine's DNA portion; the full combination will be tested later. At a microbiology meeting in Washington on Friday, Nabel and colleagues reported seeing no worrisome side effects when comparing six people given dummy shots with 21 volunteers given increasing doses of the DNA vaccine."
TFA says "volunteers" but I'll bet they're paid volunteers. I wonder if they're told that they're being injected with ebola?
They have to be. Otherwise it would be a serious medical ethics violation that could end their careers.
considering the rarity of ebola, what's the point of a vaccine? Who do you even give it to? From wikipedia: "Of the approximate 1,500 identified Ebola cases worldwide, over 80% of the patients have died." Maybe we should be working on a cure for fan death instead.
As for malaria, it is far from eradicated. While you won't hear about it much in temperate climes or in developed nations, it's still a very big problem for millions of people who live in rural areas or don't have ready access to the drugs that prevent and kill it. For that matter, not all of the old, cheap drugs work as well any more, and the expensive newre ones are great for suburbanites on vacation to the tropics, but not as easily disseminated to the slums of India or the far reaches of Africa.
My other sig is funny.
For a value of "ever" that does not include infection w/ an incurable, fatal disease. Right?
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meningococcus
...
Yes, antibiotics are reserved to fight bacterial infections, but it's stupid to say you can not vaccinate against bacterial infections and only virii. Why do we take pre-emptive measures to fight bacterial meningitis by way of vaccination?
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it is my believe a vaccination is merely a precautionary cure regardless of the type of ilness (bacteria / virus)
I think you are mistaking the point of the fear. The problem is in the death rate, not the total number of deaths.
People are not afraid of the common flu, since the death rate nowadays is what, less than 0.01%? However, both Ebola and Avian Flu have a high chance of killing you, if you get it.
I think that the concern currently is the transmission of the Avian flu virus like the common flu, i.e. influentza with a death rate of 50% or so.
Frankly that's an idiotic argument. Fortunatly our medical science has now advanced to the point we can see potential threats coming. Avian Influenza is a case in point - if it does mutate to pass from human to human then it's very likely to be a rerun of 1918 (the viruses are remarkably similar) and kill 5% of the population. The 1918 epidemic killed more people that WWI.
Ebola is less of an immediate threat, but there are some signs that it, or something related, could mutate to an airborne or aerosol form. On the scale of risk the probability is low, but there's some convincing arguments that some past plagues - even the Black Death - were hemorregic fevers.
It therefore makes sense that we take some preventative measures against potential threats now. Personally I'm very glad that the WHO hyped up Avian Flu because at least governments have started to take some precautions, pump money into vaccine development etc. If we are luckly and the virus doesn't mutate for another year or two then there's a good chance that the death rate from an epidemic could be substantially cut. Reducing the number of cases of Avian Flu in humans by culling birds and inducing fear in the populations where it occurs all helps by reducing the chances the virus has to mutate.
Of course in some cases the percieved threat will never have been real, and in others preventative actions will stall a major disaster so the sceptics will argue there was no major threat in the first place. Whatever, in both human and economic terms the cost of a small amount of hype and preparatory action now will pay off many, many times over.
That reads like the flyleaf of a thriller.
I'm still a lot more scared of getting hit by a car.
And, frankly, I'd say that Africa should worry a lot more about AIDS than about Ebola.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.