Ebola Vaccine Passes Initial Human Tests

An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com has an article about the first successful tests of an Ebola vaccine on human subjects." From the article: "Nabel and colleagues at the NIH's Vaccine Research Center developed a vaccine made of DNA strands that encode three Ebola proteins. They boosted that vaccine with a weakened cold-related virus, and the combination protected monkeys exposed to Ebola. The first human testing looked just at the vaccine's DNA portion; the full combination will be tested later. At a microbiology meeting in Washington on Friday, Nabel and colleagues reported seeing no worrisome side effects when comparing six people given dummy shots with 21 volunteers given increasing doses of the DNA vaccine."

Medical experiments for the lot of us...

[benjamindees]

TFA says "volunteers" but I'll bet they're paid volunteers. I wonder if they're told that they're being injected with ebola?

Re:What is Ebola?

[baryon351]

If I remember correctly, Ebola was this virus a few years ago that "spread from apes to humans" and thus would spread and kill us all. Wait, isn't that what Avian Flu is going to do to us? It's all a lot of hype.

It's a lot of valid potentiality that gets drummed up as hype by doomsayers, the media, and anyone else who has something to gain by promoting a state of fear, interest or worry in people.

Total worldwide ebola deaths since 1976 are 1,500. If you catch it, there's an 80% chance you'll die.

But then there have been 1.2million people in the US alone killed in fatal car accidents in the same time period. If you're caught in a fatal car accident, there's a pretty big chance you'll die too.

Avian flu is known to have killed under 100 people worldwide, since 1996. Worldwide deaths from normal influenza currently reach 500,000 EVERY SINGLE YEAR worldwide. FIVE MILLION PEOPLE since 1996.

Read the above and you see how the panic effect of statistics is all in how the info is presented. Don't rely on alarmist messages of any type (this one included) to base your fears on, go & read up as much background info as you can. It makes the only sense.

Immunity

[Stoned4Life]

Quoting from the article, "...the vaccine recipients produced Ebola-specific antibodies, giving 'us some confidence that the vaccine is having an effect on the immune system'..." If this is the case, it will most likely be added among the shots we receive when we are born. Possibly, if all goes well, we could at it to Malaria as a thing of the past. You just have to wonder though, does it have the potential to mutate and develope new/different strands?

Re:Immunity

[Kohaku Nanaya]

Ebola right now has had millions of years to develop and grow. It is said to be one of the oldest lifeforms on Earth. It has become so used to us, that it can completely overcome our current immune system as if it were nonexistant. I'd be glad for a cure but..if anything has the ability to dramaticly change, it's this thing.

Re:BULLSHIT

[Medinole]

I don't know the specifics of that occasion, but: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct/info/whatis#whati s [clinicaltrials.gov] Informed consent is an essential part of the drug testing process, and I did not see anything in the above article to suggest that it was not used. Unfortnately, human trials often come with side effects, both expected and unexpected, and it is just part of the process (heartless though that may be). For a drug to even make it to the point of clinical trials in humans it must show enough a high enough risk to reward ratio in animal and analytical models. A major problem with HIV is that the only animal models that are close are primates, and the strain of "HIV" they carry is not similar enough to what is in humans for scientists to be able to accurately predict a drugs action in human HIV. Still, toxilogical data would have been gathered from animal models in your case, and it was decided by the powers that be that the side effects of those drugs did not warrent an end to this (these?) drug's trial. Only about 1/10,000 potential drugs actually makes it to market, not many "bad" drugs will ever be released to the public. They always have a benefit that is percieved as being greater than the detriment.

Re:Medical experiments for the lot of us...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this splicing of DNA into a cold virus a new technique? Any chance of "whoops we made an Ebola variant that spreads like the common cold" ?
 

Re:VACCINE FOR A BACTERIA???

[whitehatlurker]

While antibiotics are for bacteria, there are also vaccines for bacteria caused diseases [immunizationinfo.org]. As well, while it's neither virus nor bacterium, there is a Malaria Vaccine Initiative [malariavaccine.org], funded in part by the Gates Foundation.

Yes, we should get terminology correct. I will not point out why the "ebola virus" would not be affected by antibiotics.