Phase 2 Vaccine Trial Prevents Ebola In Liberia

[angelatc]

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1614067

Phase 2 Placebo-Controlled Trial of Two Vaccines to Prevent Ebola in Liberia

A total of 1500 adults underwent randomization and were followed for 12 months. The median age of the participants was 30 years; 36.6% of the participants were women. During the week after the administration of vaccine or placebo, adverse events occurred significantly more often with the active vaccines than with placebo; these events included injection-site reactions (in 28.5% of the patients in the ChAd3-EBO-Z group and 30.9% of those in the rVSV∆G-ZEBOV-GP group, as compared with 6.8% of those in the placebo group), headache (in 25.1% and 31.9%, vs. 16.9%), muscle pain (in 22.3% and 26.9%, vs. 13.3%), feverishness (in 23.9% and 30.5%, vs. 9.0%), and fatigue (in 14.0% and 15.4%, vs. 8.8%) (P<0.001 for all comparisons); these differences were not seen at 1 month. Serious adverse events within 12 months after injection were seen in 40 participants (8.0%) in the ChAd3-EBO-Z group, in 47 (9.4%) in the rVSV∆G-ZEBOV-GP group, and in 59 (11.8%) in the placebo group. By 1 month, an antibody response developed in 70.8% of the participants in the ChAd3-EBO-Z group and in 83.7% of those in the rVSV∆G-ZEBOV-GP group, as compared with 2.8% of those in the placebo group (P<0.001 for both comparisons). At 12 months, antibody responses in participants in the ChAd3-EBO-Z group (63.5%) and in those in the rVSV∆G-ZEBOV-GP group (79.5%) remained significantly greater than in those in the placebo group (6.8%, P<0.001 for both comparisons).

[angelatc]

https://health.usnews.com/health-car...mmune-response

Two experimental vaccines against the deadly Ebola virus are able to trigger an immune response that lasts for at least a year, a new clinical trial has found.

Experts said the results give more support to one of the vaccines, in particular.

That vaccine, dubbed rVSV-ZEBOV, made headlines last year when it appeared highly effective at preventing Ebola disease in a large clinical trial.

That trial was done in Guinea during the Ebola epidemic that swept across several West African nations between 2013 and 2016.

The outbreak ultimately killed more than 11,000 people and likely sickened nearly 29,000, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The new study was done in Liberia and enrolled 1,500 adults. Researchers tested rVSV-ZEBOV, along with another experimental vaccine called ChAd3-EBO-Z.

They found that both vaccines elicited an immune system response against Ebola.

Almost 84 percent of people given the rVSV-ZEBOV and 71 percent of those given the ChAd3-EBO-Z vaccine developed antibodies against the virus within a month.

And most were still showing an immune response after one year.

That's the main new finding from the trial, said Thomas Geisbert, an Ebola researcher who was not involved in the study.

"This shows there's some durability of the immune response, which is important," said Geisbert, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

He added, though, that it's not clear how significant that lasting immune response might be.

[donnay]

Hegelian Dialect--Problem, reaction, solution.

University Professor Says Ebola Is A “Genetically Modified, Lab-Made” Virus

An associate at Delaware University has a sensational claim: that the Ebola virus is a ‘genetically modified, lab-made virus’.

Dr. Cyril Broderick is a former professor of plant pathology at the University of Liberia’s College of Agriculture and Forestry, and is on tenure as an associate at Delaware University.

Broderick claims that the Ebola virus which recently ran rampant in Western Africa was genetically modified, made in a lab by Western pharmaceutical companies, and administered to unsuspecting civilians through United Nations vaccination programs.

The Washington Post has called it a wild conspiracy theory. The Times reports:

“Delaware State University said it won’t interfere with the free speech rights of a tenured professor who wrote a wildly speculative and conspiratorial article in a Liberian newspaper in which he claimed that the U.S. government manufactured the Ebola virus and spread it in West Africa under the guise of vaccine testing…

The article in question — headlined “Ebola, AIDS Manufactured By Western Pharmaceuticals, US DoD?” — appeared in a major Liberian newspaper, the Daily Observer, earlier this month.”

http://naturalsociety.com/university...ab-made-virus/

[Weston White]

God or government, which is more plausible?

Why do these viruses always seem to start in Africa, with African victims, and only came about since 70 and 80's?

It is very likely Ebola, first suddenly discovered in 1976, was a predecessor to HIV/AIDS.

Damn those primates! Primates have killed more Americans than guns, terrorists, peanut butter, and bees combined!

[juleswin]

One of my classmates in Nigeria was telling me that more people died from the rumor that salt and water (saline) concoction treated ebola than the ebola virus itself. Essentially, the panic and hysteria associated with it was more deadly than the virus itself.

I have always wondered why it flares up and then just dies town immediately. They say it is most likely coming from re exposure from someone who was previously infected but I don't know why I cannot believe that story.

[specsaregood]

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1614067
Phase 2 Placebo-Controlled Trial of Two Vaccines to Prevent Ebola in Liberia
[/B]

I thought this part was interesting;

Serious adverse events within 12 months after injection were seen in 40 participants (8.0%) in the ChAd3-EBO-Z group, in 47 (9.4%) in the rVSV∆G-ZEBOV-GP group, and in 59 (11.8%) in the placebo group.

the placebo group has more people with serious adverse events within 12 months...

[Zippyjuan]

God or government, which is more plausible?

Why do these viruses always seem to start in Africa, with African victims, and only came about since 70 and 80's?

It is very likely Ebola, first suddenly discovered in 1976, was a predecessor to HIV/AIDS.

Damn those primates! Primates have killed more Americans than guns, terrorists, peanut butter, and bees combined!

Ebola was identified as one cause of hemorrhagic fevers in 1976 but even explorers in the 1800's reported cases. It isn't a modern disease.

Consider a narrative from 1865 by the explorer Samuel Baker from the South of Sudan, an area close to Nzara where the 1976 outbreak occurred, which offers some insight6. While Baker calls the disease “the plague”, it is evident that the symptoms do not resemble the disease caused by Yersinia pestis, but describe a lethal form of hemorrhagic fever, perhaps Ebola, as the following excerpt narrates:

“All before us was clear and plain sailing. For some days two or three of our men had been complaining of severe headache, giddiness, and violent pains in the spine and between the shoulders. I had been anxious when at Gondokoro concerning the vessel, as many persons while on board had died of the plague, during the voyage from Khartoum. The men assured me that the most fatal symptom was violent bleeding from the nose; in such cases no one had been known to recover. One of the boatmen, who had been ailing for some days, suddenly went to the side of the vessel and hung his head over the river; his nose was bleeding!

Another of my men, Yaseen, was ill; his uncle, my vakeel, came to me with a report that "his nose was bleeding violently!’ Several other men fell ill; they lay helplessly about the deck in low muttering delirium, their eyes as yellow as orange-peel. In two or three days the vessel was so horribly offensive as to be unbearable. The plague has broken out! We floated past the river Sobat junction; the wind was fair from the south, thus fortunately we in the stern were to windward of the crew. Yaseen died; he was one who had bled at the nose. We stopped to bury him. The funeral hastily arranged, we again set sail. Mahommed died; he had bled at the nose. Another burial. Once more we set sail and hurried down the Nile. Several men were ill, but the dreaded symptom had not appeared. I had given each man a strong dose of calomel at the commencement of the disease; I could do nothing more, as my medicines were exhausted. All night we could hear the sick muttering and raving in delirium, but from years of association with disagreeables we had no fear of the infection.

One morning the boy Saat came to me with his head bound up, and complained of severe pain in the back and limbs, with all the usual symptoms of plague. In the afternoon I saw him leaning over the ship's side; his nose was bleeding violently! At night he was delirious. On the following morning he was raving, and on the vessel stopping to collect firewood he threw himself into the river to cool the burning fever that consumed him. His eyes were suffused with blood, which, blended with a yellow as deep as the yolk of egg, gave a terrible appearance to his face, that was already so drawn and changed as to be hardly recognized. Poor Saat! The faithful boy that we had adopted, and who had formed so bright an exception to the dark character of his race, was now a victim to this horrible disease. He was a fine strong lad of nearly fifteen, and he now lay helplessly on his mat, and cast wistful glances at the face of his mistress as she gave him a cup of cold water mixed with a few. An hour passed, and he slept. Karka, the fat, good-natured slave woman, quietly went to his side; gently taking him by the ankles and knees, she stretched his legs into a straight position, and laid his arms parallel with his sides. She then covered his face with a cloth, one of the few rags that we still possessed. ‘Does he sleep still?’ we asked. The tears ran down the cheeks of the savage but good-hearted Karka as she sobbed, ‘He is dead’.”

Texts like these pinpoint potential hot spots for Ebola outbreaks, and reveal the epidemiology of these VHF viruses in absence of modern control measures.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hemo...hrome&ie=UTF-8