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Ebola Vaccine Trials Forcing Tough Choices
An anonymous reader writes: Medical researchers hope an experimental vaccine for Ebola can help protect against infection and slow the spread of the disease. Efficacy trials for the vaccine begin in a few months, and it's forcing some difficult decisions for health care officials. The first test will involve front line health care workers, who, as a group, are at the gravest risk of infection. But every trial needs a control group, and scientists are bitterly divided over whether the vaccine should be withheld from a portion of those putting their lives on the line to protect the rest of us. Development of the vaccine has been vastly accelerated already, due to the virus's spread and its mortality rate.
"The leading alternative is a design known as step-wedge, which essentially uses time to create a control group. In this design, researchers take advantage of the inescapable reality that large-scale trials can't give everyone the vaccine on the exact same date; they compare the rates of infection in people already vaccinated with those who have yet to receive the shots. Barney Graham, a virologist ... says "people are more comfortable" with the step-wedge design, because everyone in such a study would get the Ebola vaccine. But statistically speaking, this design makes it more difficult to determine the vaccine's worth, and it takes longer." NY Mag has a related story summarizing the treatments currently being used to fight Ebola.
"The leading alternative is a design known as step-wedge, which essentially uses time to create a control group. In this design, researchers take advantage of the inescapable reality that large-scale trials can't give everyone the vaccine on the exact same date; they compare the rates of infection in people already vaccinated with those who have yet to receive the shots. Barney Graham, a virologist ... says "people are more comfortable" with the step-wedge design, because everyone in such a study would get the Ebola vaccine. But statistically speaking, this design makes it more difficult to determine the vaccine's worth, and it takes longer." NY Mag has a related story summarizing the treatments currently being used to fight Ebola.
They are doing more about it because of the scale of the current problem.
That scale is also the reason a person in the US got infected.
The scale is likely the result of a mutation in the virus, there's a much longer incubation time now.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
No, the rush to create a vaccine coinicdes with the latest outbreak, which has 10 times (and counting) the number of infected as the next largest outbreak. More importantly, all previous outbreaks were local and contained reasonably easily. This is the first time Ebola is getting away from us; in previous cases we had the option of containing it and letting it run its course, now it looks like that may no longer be enough.
And before this outbreak happened, research into vaccines was already taking place. Of course the urgency is somewhat higher now, since we may be looking at a global epidemic. This has nothing to do with ohmygodanAMERICANgotinfected.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This latest outbreak has already infected more than in the entire history of the virus prior to it. There hasn't been a great deal of effort, because there simply hasn't been a great deal of need. It takes time for labs to spool up against an outbreak, and the fact that new treatments are coming down the pipeline right around the same time the virus starts spreading to other countries is purely coincidence.
Funny that ebola has been in existence in the modern world since the 70s, yet only now this is coming to light. Oddly enough, this is perfectly timed with someone in the US getting infected.
"Shit, this is on OUR turf now!??! Better do something about it!"
There is a causal relation driving this correlation, but it's not the one you cynically postulate. Both the appearance of someone in the US with the disease and the attempt to create a vaccine have been caused by the scale of the latest outbreak.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Coincidence, maybe, but the fact that the vaccine was ready *almost as soon* as the first american was infected proves that the vaccine was in development for a *long time* before that happened.
What? Do people actually believe the TV shows they watch? Vaccines don't actually get developed over night.
What vaccine? There is no vaccine? All we have is antiviral drugs that are effectively antibody supplements. In previous outbreaks, people have been cured by receiving blood (and antibodies) from someone who has already successfully fought off the infection. The drugs are basically just an artificially manufactured form of that. You don't run large volume production of an experimental drug for a virus that only has small outbreaks every few years.