An ebola vaccine may be in the works
This is potentially very good news. Very:
Researchers gave one dose of the new vaccine, developed by the Canadian government, to more than 4,000 people who were contacts of confirmed Ebola cases within 10 days of being identified. In comparison, more than 3,500 contacts of other Ebola cases got the shot after a 10-day delay. In the group that received the vaccine immediately, there were no Ebola cases versus 16 cases in people who got delayed vaccination…
Researchers are still assessing possible side effects; the most serious seemed to be fever and the stress experienced by patients who believe such symptoms were due to Ebola.
“This (vaccine) could be the key that we’ve been missing to end the outbreak,” Neuman said. “I don’t see any reason on humanitarian grounds why it should not be used immediately.”
Sometimes these things turn out to be much less promising than originally described, however. In addition, the epidemic seems to have really died down for now, although the disease will almost certainly rear up again in the future.
That’s good news!
Yes indeed. Potentially very good news and very important. More important, I’d say, than a dead lion or Donald Trump’s mouth. Oh MSM! Just when I thought my respect for you had hot rock bottom.
Wait, there is actually good news. I thought there cease to actually be good news.
Canada? See, you couldn’t develop a vaccine like this in the USA because the FDA would require ten years of testing before approving it. And then, after you had spent billions on the required testing, the government would demand that you gave the vaccine away for free.
The turn in the West African Ebola epidemic turned last October and November, when behavior changed.
The Obama administration was arguably late, or maybe just in time last September, when joining in the fight with a half billion dollar outlay to build temporary hospitals for triage sorting of possibly infected victims.
The only “treatment” for an untreatable disease is isolation.
What kept the almost two-year Ebola epidemic going and spreading were certain hands-on burial rites practiced in the region. Only nation-wide emergency shut downs with a few days of home isolation – controversial at the time –
http://reliefweb.int/report/sierra-leone/sierra-leone-readies-controversial-ebola-shutdown
achieved the behavior-change breakthrough.
This made turned the tide of epidemic death, then doubling in cases every three weeks.
It was epidemiologist Michale Osterholm – who in the early 1980s first identified “gay plague” as viral entity which was bloodborne because transmission pattern paralled Hepatitis B – and last October, at an ebola symposium hosted at Johns Hopkins University, suggested that a vaccine would likely bring the Ebola outbreak to an end.
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/10/symposium-vaccine-seen-best-hope-arresting-ebola
In a paper published last winter, Osterholm, et al, showed that the Ebola virus became more lethal and more easily transmissible later in the course of the disease.
At any rate, the current good news on a workable virus – just as reports of fresh outbreaks in Liberia and Sierra-Leonne have occurred – appears to confirm Osterholm’s prognostication that an Ebola vaccine would be needed to end the still-lively West African disease outbreak
Hussein will always be able to get more enterovirus mixes to kill American children with, even if ebola can’t be imported.
Ebola news has been (informally?) embargoed in the “news media,” but I’ve been asked in the last couple of months by ER docs about whether I was recently in any part of West Africa.
So they’re still checking, and Ebola transmission is still going on in New York City.
I hate this “Cone of Silence” BS we’re seeing the ruling class use more and more. As an Englishman said to me thirty years ago, “We’re mushrooms: kept in the dark and pissed on from a great height.”
Call me a pessimist; but, while this might seem like good news I will wait until we learn more.
For example, sure, maybe it will help to spare lives. But, what if it allows for someone to not get the symptoms of the disease but still become a carrier? Will the disease spread more easily that way until we learn about it? By which time it will be too late!
The powers that be wouldn’t tell us a thing it that did turn out to be the case. Their excuse would be to “avoid panic” we don’t want the public to know.
(yea, I know, I’m wearing a tinfoil hat)
Odd study. Ebola incubation is 21 days, so why divide the two groups into 1st 10 days and 2nd ten days? It take two weeks to mobilize an antibody response, so the later group was destined to do less well from the outset. Ethical issues here.
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(yea, I know, I’m wearing a tinfoil hat)
I think the tinfoil hat has been retired. Now people are wearing hazmat hoodies.
The hoodie is popular now.