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An experimental vaccine for Ebola has been developed by the World Health Organization and has displayed a 100% success rate on its trials in Guinea.
"It's the first vaccine for which efficacy has been shown," said Dr Marie-Paule Kieny, a WHO assistant director-general and the study's lead author.
The vaccine was distributed to 5,837 people last year in Guinea, according to the Lancet medical journal. Within 10 days, all participants were free of the virus; they were followed up on for 84 days. It has proven to be nearly free of major side-effects (minor side-effects included headaches, fatigue, and muscle pain, but what doesn't), except for 80 people who had severe problems, only 2 of which could accurately be linked to the vaccine. All recovered without complications.
Other treatments are still under study, and other strains of Ebola such as Sudan still need a vaccine.
Sources: The Lancet Al Jazeera NY Times
(Score: 4, Informative) by Joe on Tuesday December 27 2016, @06:18PM
One of the things that was most innovative about the study was the approach taken in their vaccine trial. The group used a ring vaccination strategy that was blinded and had randomized immediate-vaccination and a delayed-vaccination group. Both the ring strategy and the delayed group helped the study acquire enough individuals to show that the vaccine worked despite the small number of cases (the trial was done near the end of the outbreak).
The vaccine itself, is a replication-competent recombinant virus that is mostly made of the vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV mainly infects cattle, but can cause influenza-like symptoms in humans), but the surface protein is switched for one from ebolavirus.
- Joe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_vaccination [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSV-EBOV [wikipedia.org]