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Ebola Vaccine 100% Successful In Guinea Trial
An anonymous reader writes: Doctors and researchers have been testing a vaccine to protect against Ebola in the west African nation of Guinea. Trials involving 4,000 people have now shown a 100% success rate in preventing infection. "When Ebola flared up in a village, researchers vaccinated all the contacts of the sick person who were willing — the family, friends and neighbors — and their immediate contacts. Children, adolescents and pregnant women were excluded because of an absence of safety data for them. In practice about 50% of people in these clusters were vaccinated. To test how well the vaccine protected people, the cluster outbreaks were randomly assigned either to receive the vaccine immediately or three weeks after Ebola was confirmed. Among the 2,014 people vaccinated immediately, there were no cases of Ebola from 10 days after vaccination — allowing time for immunity to develop — according to the results published online in the Lancet medical journal (PDF). In the clusters with delayed vaccination, there were 16 cases out of 2,380."
Even an Ebola vaccine that was only effective for a short period of time would be wonderful. Ebola isn't a subtle disease, and outbreaks tend to start in fairly isolated villages, perhaps because the reservoir is an animal. When someone in a village starts bleeding out of every orifice, administer the vaccine to everyone in the village. That stops the outbreak in it's tracks.
Until recently no one has bothered to invest in Africa (only now China). Western powers, particularly the US, actually found it to be a good place to dump farm commodity surplus (USAID). Since these are principally agrarian nations that was particularly helpful to the farmers whom have a hard time competing with free. To support their families the farmers turn to growing coffee for export. Not only does this NOT produce food for local consumption, but these farmers tend to get severely screwed by the middlemen (only weakly mitigated by the joke known as "Fair Trade" certification). The investment that did come (principally oil) went directly into the coffers of despotic leaders of whom are far more concerned with keeping their citizens' necks under their boot than with education, health, infrastructure, etc..
Don't over-estimate the "help" the western world provides to Africa. The principal goal of which is to make the west feel good about themselves not to bootstrap their entrance into the first world.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
It is interesting that when there is a limited broad commercial viability, the "drug" designers and chemists are able to whip up a cure for something in under a year.
Problem: They've been working on the Ebola vaccine for a lot longer than a year. What really happened is that they had a vaccine in the early testing stages, with something like an estimated 5 years of testing left before it could be commercially deployed. Then we have a relatively huge ebola outbreak, panic sets in and they grant a waiver for the testing. Basically, they had enough information that 'We think this will probably help you survive exposure to Ebola. We're pretty sure it won't hurt you'. So they administer the vaccine in a sort of accelerated study, because it might save lives. Turns out it probably did.
Outside of an Ebola outbreak, the risks weren't worth it. During one? Worth it.
It actually reminds me of the first vaccination methods - Variolation. Fascinating history. Various versions around, but had a top end of 1% chance of death. Yes, the vaccination itself killed 1% of those treated. But it was against smallpox - with a death rate of 30% during epidemics. As long as the chances of catching smallpox was above 4%, it was 'worth it' to variate. And in Europe, the chances were a lot higher than 4%. Even royalty variolated their children.
As for cancer - apples and oranges dude. The problem with cancer is that it's actually lots of different problems, all under the same name. Causes, effects, treatments, all different.
We've developed lots of cures for various cancers, just not all of them yet.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm sure that some people will still blame "colonialism", although that hasn't even been an issue for generations now.
Even then, we've seen many other regions, like most of Europe, China, Japan, South Korea and even Vietnam, go from total devastation due to war to modern societies capable of producing such research, over roughly the same period of time. Why isn't Africa progressing when so many other nations, often with much fewer resources and far less support, and coming from a much worse situation, managed to turn things around?
Colonialism is still a huge issue because the colonial borders are still in place, the borders were designed to keep them weak by putting rival tribes in the same country.
In Europe and Asia a government can get reasonable levels of support across most of the country because they figure they're all on the same side, so you get investment in the future and a generally functional society.
But in Africa it's really hard to develop a country when a government can never get real support outside of their ethnic group, everyone ends up playing a zero-sum game and you end up with corruption and violence. All that's going to fix it is a lot of time until African's start thinking of themselves as primarily members of their country and not of a tribe.
I stole this Sig
From the article: "The rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine is sometimes known as the Canadian vaccine as it was originally developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada before being sold to Merck to conclude the testing."
Which is actually leaving out a step. Newlink Genetics bought it, sat on it for years, then sold it to Merck.