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."

Comments

Re:The Onion had it right

[Anonymous Coward]

Joking aside, we should be asking ourselves why Africa, the second-largest continent, made up of over 50 countries, with over 1 billion people in total, and a vast amount of natural resources and wealth, couldn't find any sort of a solution to this home-grown problem.

Why did they have to resort on foreigners, literally half a world away, for a solution to this problem?

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?

Some others will probably blame it on a lack of research facilities, totally ignoring that Africa does have universities and could very well build their own research facilities if the existing ones weren't sufficient. In fact, that difficult part is already done: they just need to build what have existed for many decades in other areas of the world.

It's not like this is the first major Ebola outbreak, either. It has been around for decades now, with other severe outbreaks in the past. It isn't a new problem.

Corruption may be to blame, but that's more of an excuse than anything else. There are a number of democracies in Africa, that actually do hold quite fair and free elections. If corruption is still an issue in these places, then that's yet another problem that Africa just isn't bothering to actually deal with.

I know it's trendy to blame Westerners for all of the world's problems, but they're the only ones we see taking any sort of positive initiative in this case.

Why don't we see any significant effort from any of Africa's 50+ nations, or it's 1+ billion people, or any of its governments that pull in significant income due to natural resources, to combat this problem that affects them more than anyone else?

Re:The Onion had it right

[quantaman]

So at the end of the day: if these populations wish to enter the first world, the first step to take is to assert their ownership of the land they occupy on the continent, decide on their own borders

Bad borders are bad, but trying to redraw borders? That can be much, much worse.

One of the big rules in Africa (and pretty much everywhere) is you don't change national borders because that introduces massive stakes and is a recipe for wars and rebellion since every group decides they want their own country comprising of every bit of land they think their group is entitled to.

or (like other countries in the first world), abandon tribal identity so they progress on to greater things like indoor plumbing and medical research.

That's the solution but I think it's far from simple. Look at the US, there are two parties sharing a white Christian base and the political system has been deadlocked and dysfunctional for half a decade.

What do you think would happen if half the country was Protestant and the other half Muslim, or New Jersey was 50+% Italian descent, Michigan 50+% Nigerian, Texas 50+% Mexican, etc. Getting people to cooperate in a political system is not simple.