Ebola vaccine found to be effective

Publishing the results online in the medical journal The Lancet on Friday, researchers said they showed that the vaccine could be “highly efficacious in preventing Ebola virus disease”.

“The initial results are exciting and very promising”, said Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, in a press conference earlier today.

About 28,000 people have been infected in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia in the worst Ebola outbreak in history, according to the WHO, and more than 11,000 have died.

The incidence of new cases has waned this year, raising the prospect that some clinical trials already under way won’t provide definitive results about whether the experimental vaccines and therapies are safe and effective.

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.

When Ebola broke out in a village, researchers vaccinated all the contacts of the sick person. In village B, all such people were vaccinated but only after 21 days.

To test how well the vaccine protected people, the outbreaks were randomly assigned either to receive the vaccine immediately or three weeks after Ebola was confirmed.

H. Clifford Lane, deputy director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, has said the ring-vaccination design wasn’t ideal because all test subjects get a vaccine and thus it is hard to discern differences between the immediate-vaccine group and the 21-day group.

It appears the world finally has an effective Ebola vaccine.

The study was led by the WHO and involved a variety of partners including the governments of Guinea and Norway, the Public Health Agency of Canada, Medicins Sans Frontieres and Britain’s Wellcome Trust charity.