[ 2014-12-26 ]

Ebola ‘vaccine’ offers new hope
More than 20,000 people in west Africa will be
given a revolutionary new drug next month that its
developers hope could halt the march of the
biggest ebola outbreak in history.
As millions in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea
endured a muted Christmas, avoiding large-scale
public gatherings that might spread the disease
still further, the American immunologist leading
the hunt for a vaccine has revealed that a
possible treatment has emerged.
Anthony Fauci, the head of America’s National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will
head for Liberia next month to oversee the start
of phase two and three clinical trials of the
unnamed drug, involving 20,000 people in Liberia
and thousands more in Sierra Leone. It is the
first time that a potential vaccine has reached
such an advanced stage.
His team could know as early as mid-summer whether
they have a vaccine. If so, GlaxoSmithKline, the
British drugs maker, is confident that it can
produce millions of doses within months.
“We will have a vaccine for ebola. Whether it is
this vaccine or another vaccine, I can’t tell
you, but I feel confident that we will have a
vaccine against ebola,” Dr Fauci said.
Western health officials are struggling to end the
epidemic, which has killed 7,588 people worldwide,
all but a handful of them in Africa. There are
still more than 1,200 new cases per week and
President Obama has warned that “the fight is
not even close to being over”. Such is the
failure to contain the virus using the traditional
methods of identification, isolation and contact
tracing that, according to Dr Fauci, a vaccine may
be the only thing capable of stopping it.
Those efforts were continuing to flounder
yesterday, with Sierra Leone’s government
declaring a five-day lockdown in the country’s
north, including forbidding large public
gatherings over Christmas. Small groups were
allowed to gather for church services, but most
Sierra Leoneans observed a sombre Christmas in
their homes instead of the traditional boisterous
celebrations. Family gatherings, such as beach
parties, concerts and dances, were banned.
Dr Fauci said that, in order to speed up the
manufacture of an ebola vaccine, the US government
had agreed to commit to buying large quantities of
it, even if not all were used. He said he was
cautiously optimistic that a vaccine would be
found because evidence from ebola survivors
suggested that they developed very strong
resistance once they had caught the virus once.
He said it was possible that a modestly good
vaccine might be found at first that may have a
fairly good impact on the epidemic, paving the way
for a better vaccine.
The alternative is stark: there are about five
possible drugs under development around the world,
but if none was to come through trials
successfully, Dr Fauci said that the fight against
the haemorrhagic fever would have to return to
simple identification, isolation and contact
tracing, but on a massive scale, with more field
hospitals and a lot more resources.
Dr Fauci, who was given the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, for
his pioneering work on HIV-Aids, has already
enjoyed some success in combating ebola. He
co-ordinated the treatment of Nina Pham, a nurse
who contracted ebola after caring for Thomas
Duncan, a Liberian who had been visiting relatives
in Texas before his death in October in hospital
in Dallas. When she was given the all-clear and
discharged after a plasma transplant, a photograph
of Ms Pham and Dr Fauci, 74, embracing made the
news worldwide.
“We happened to get a patient, a lovely,
devoted, beautiful young nurse who was very sick .
. . to see her grad- ually get better and better
and then to see her come out in front of everyone
with her hair done and her make-up, it was quite
beyond gratifying, it was quite emotional.
“That’s the reason why we gave each other that
hug — it was very heartfelt, because I had
mostly seen her in bed, dehydrated, her hair flat
and straggly and her seeing me through a mask.
Then here I am, with a clean white coat and
she’s got a nice outfit on, looking beautiful in
front of the cameras — that was a great
feeling.”
There have been at least 20 ebola cases in the
United States and Europe during the present
outbreak. Two people have died in America, but
eight have recovered. US midterm elections in
November were fought against a backdrop of rising
anxiety over ebola, with parents in neighbouring
states threatening to take their children out of
school because of fears about the virus in Texas.
“There has been, in the US, this almost hysteria
about ebola, and discrimination. Not deliberate,
malignant discrimination, but ‘stay away from
me, you’re a healthcare worker’.
“It was just a spontaneous hug, but everybody
told me that was the most important thing that
could have possibly been done because the world
saw an American doctor, with his arms around this
girl, giving her a genuine fatherly hug. I think
that made people say, ‘OK, these people are
safe.’ ”

Source - The Times(UK)

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