Ebola Vaccine Tested In Guinea Boasts '100-Percent' Effectiveness

by Guest Sat Aug 01, 2015 6:54 am

An experimental Ebola vaccine tested on thousands of people in Guinea has shown "100-Percent" effectiveness and might help shut down the waning epidemic in West Africa, according to interim results from a study published Friday.

There is currently no licensed treatment or vaccine for Ebola, which has so far killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa since the world's biggest outbreak began in the forest region of Guinea last year. Cases have dropped dramatically in recent months in the other two hard-hit countries, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

"If proven effective, this is going to be a game-changer," said Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organisation, which sponsored the study. "It will change the management of the current outbreak and future outbreaks."

Scientists have struggled for years to develop Ebola treatments and vaccines but have faced numerous hurdles, including the sporadic nature of outbreaks and funding shortages. Many past attempts have failed, including a recently abandoned drug being tested in West Africa by Tekmira Pharmaceuticals.

The study involved several thousand people who had been near a new Ebola patient or a close contact of one. They were randomly assigned to get the vaccine right away or in three weeks. Researchers started tracking results 10 days after they set up the groups to give time to weed out any people who might have been silently harboring the virus when the study began.

After that point, none of the people in the group that had been assigned to get the vaccine right away developed Ebola, versus 16 people in the group eligible to get the vaccine after 21 days. The vaccine, developed by the Canadian government, has since been licensed to Merck & Co. but has not yet been approved by regulators. The study results were published online Friday in the journal Lancet.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/07/31/ebola-vaccine-tested-in-guinea-boasts-100-percent-success-rate_n_7913762.html?utm_hp_ref=uk

by Guest Mon Dec 26, 2016 4:53 pm

Health
New Ebola Vaccine Gives 100 Percent Protection
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.DEC. 22, 2016
In a scientific triumph that will change the way the world fights a terrifying killer, an experimental Ebola vaccine tested on humans in the waning days of the West African epidemic has been shown to provide 100 percent protection against the lethal disease.
The vaccine has not yet been approved by any regulatory authority, but it is considered so effective that an emergency stockpile of 300,000 doses has already been created for use should an outbreak flare up again.
Since Ebola was discovered in the former Zaire in 1976, there have been many efforts to create a vaccine. All began with a sense of urgency but then petered out for lack of money. Although only about 1,600 people died of Ebola over those years, the grotesque nature their deaths — copious hemorrhaging from every orifice — has lent the disease a frightening reputation.
Ultimately, only the huge, explosive 2014 outbreak that took 11,000 lives in Africa and spread overseas, reaching a handful of people in Europe and the United States, provided the political and economic drive to make an effective vaccine.

The vaccine was not ready in time to stop the outbreak, which probably began in a hollow, bat-filled tree in Guinea and swept Liberia and Sierra Leone before being defeated. But the prospect of a vaccine stockpile now has brought optimism among public health experts.

“While these compelling results come too late for those who lost their lives during West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, they show that when the next outbreak hits, we will not be defenseless,” said Marie-Paule Kieny, the World Health Organization’s assistant director-general for health systems and innovation and the study’s lead author. “The world can’t afford the confusion and human disaster that came with the last epidemic.”
The vaccine opens up new, faster, more efficient ways to encircle and strangle the virus. The many small Ebola outbreaks that occurred between 1976 and 2014 were all stopped in remote villages by laborious methods: medical teams flew in, isolated the sick, and donned protective gear to treat them and bury the dead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/health/ebola-vaccine.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fhealth&action=click&contentCollection=health®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

For all of the 'unknowns' and the current nuclear unrests testing our world nerves ...isn't it grand that the medical research people have kept slugging it out with this horrid Ebola virus?
And the tests that they started back in 2014 have been proven to be a worthy vaccine preventable solution for all of those people living in those regions - those wonderful humans that volunteer to go aide those needy humans. Amazing times we live in. cheers

Ebola Vaccine Tested In Guinea Boasts '100-Percent' Effectiveness

Ebola Vaccine Tested In Guinea Boasts '100-Percent' Effectiveness

EUREKA --- IT'S BEEN PROVEN 100% EFFECTIVE