The trial showed that the vaccine “offers 100 percent protection against Ebola after roughly one week”, said researcher Sven Trelle from the University of Bern. “If proven effective, this is going to be a game changer, and it will change the management of the current Ebola outbreak and future outbreaks”.
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LONDON (AP) The United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response is officially winding down Friday, handing its leadership role and senior staff to the Geneva-based World Health Organization as efforts to contain the deadly virus continue. There’s no cure for the virus right now, but infection can be avoided through routine hand-washing and by using gloves or other barriers that prevent contact with bodily fluids.
VSV-ZEBOV may become the first licensed vaccine against the disease for which there is also no approved treatment or cure. Now, it seems that scientists have a real contender on their hands.
Speaking to reporters Friday, UNMEER chief David Nabarro said he’d seen signs that WHO had already absorbed some of the lessons of the Ebola disaster, recovering its leadership role in West Africa and deploying more 1,000 staffers to the field. Among the 2,014 people who received the drug immediately, no cases of Ebola were reported, starting 10 days after the initial vaccination, which is the time period needed to develop immunity.
The “gold standard” approach would be to take a population at risk of Ebola and vaccinate half of them while giving the other half a placebo.
Disease experts welcomed the results.
The results of the trials involved 4,000 people. Starting July 26th, all of the study’s participants were given the vaccine immediately, instead of putting half in a delayed group. A new trial will now include 13 to 17-year-old and possibly 6 to 12-year-old children on the basis of new evidence of the vaccine’s safety. Major funders for these studies included the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program (JVAP), the US Department of Health and Human Service’s Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority (BARDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Wellcome Trust.
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The success of the Guinea trial is a huge relief for researchers, many of whom had feared that a sharp decline in cases this year would scupper hopes of proving that a vaccine could work.
