"An ebola vaccine?" Topic

Nearly one year after the very first case of ebola in the U.S., there is news that there may be a vaccine that could be a "game changer", as some have reported:

link

So, does it look like we've stared this medical menace in the face, and all along it was something that could, with some earnest effort, be conquered?

Medical researchers have been trying to develop an ebola vaccine for more than a decade. They'll succeed eventually. If this vaccine doesn't work, another one will.

It's good to know that researchers won't stop until a vaccine is found. The very first time I heard about ebola was twenty years ago when this book was first published:

The author, Richard Preston, was on CBS's 'The Late Late Show' that was then hosted by the late Tom Snyder, and his description of the disease was horrifying, to say the least. To have it in our proverbial "front yard" last year was unnerving, but I was VERY surprised at how treatable it was, depending on how far along the disease was and how soon a patient could be treated.

True. The key, as with so many diseases, is early detection, and knowing how to mitigate the spread.

The first hurdle was convincing villagers that the widespread practice of washing, cradling, and even sleeping beside dead family members had to end.

And I remember The Hot Zone, too.

Considering the strides made in microbiology, genetics, etc. over the last couple of decades this vaccine may be the culmination of that research.

Massive efforts have gone into varying fields of research over the years that have yet to show results.

Could even be just having the tight person at the right time with a different approach.

They are saying the vaccine has been "100% effective" so far. That's amazingly good news.

One of my concerns is for any long-term side effects from the vaccine. There was one report recently about an American doctor who was treated for ebola with, I'm presuming, the same experimental serum that was administered to other patients. The virus was eventually eliminated from his blood, but a remnant of it was later found in his eye. The virus also changed the color of his eye's iris, and it's been known that it can survive in semen for several months.

Like HIV and AIDS was at one time, we're just in the early days of learning how ebola can be treated. The above newslink is definitely encouraging, but I'm more guarded about it – for now.

I may be wrong, but I believe that case was treated with ZMapp monoclonal antibodies. This is a treatment for an already infected individual.

Vaccines prime the immune system to form an immune response prior to actual infection.

Both treatment modalities were co-developed at the Level 4 Containment National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The ironic thing is that Winnipeg is desparagingly known as Mosquitoville.

This is very good news, indeed. That the epidemic seems to be trending down is also good in that it'll give the vaccine developers time to thoroughly proof it for safety.

Now if we could only get so lucky with HIV/AIDS (a far more intractable virus…).

Alot of people use vaccine for the wrong things.

I got ANNOYED as hell when they talked about the Cuban vaccine against lung cancer.

When you read what it actualy was, it was not a vaccine at all.

The Cuban lung cancer vaccine (CimaVax) is a classic example of the press getting ahead of the science. If you read the press coverage, you'd get the impression that lung cancer has been defeated. If you look at the science, you find a very different story. And even the Cubans don't claim to have 'conquered cancer in our time'. It does appear to have promise for specific lung cancers, but clinical trials will have to verify that.