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

The Onion had it right

[mungtor]

Almost a year exactly.

http://www.theonion.com/articl...

Re:The Onion had it right

[Nethemas the Great]

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.

Re:The Onion had it right

[quantaman]

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.

Re:How long and how varied

[MightyMartian]

I'm really concerned that it might give children autism! I mean, imagine surviving an almost guaranteed fatal case of hemorrhagic fever, and the becoming autistic?

I think we have to ask ourselves "Would Jenny McCarthy give her ebola-stricken child this vaccine?"

Re:Convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's the stupidest fucking comparison I've ever seen on Slashdot. And that's a pretty impressive feat.