A vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus has led to 100% protection and could transform the way Ebola is tackled.
An Ebola vaccine provided 100% protection in a clinical field trial in hard-hit Guinea, when a patient was discovered, their friends, neighbours and family were vaccinated to create a 'protective ring' of immunity, researchers and officials said Friday, mooting “the beginning of the end” of the killer West African outbreak.
The world is "on the verge of an effective Ebola vaccine. This is an extremely promising development. An effective vaccine will be another very important tool for both current and future Ebola outbreaks," The World Health Organization (WHO) said, hailing the results from the first efficacy test of the VSV-ZEBOV vaccine among people living in a high-danger zone.
VSV-ZEBOV may become the first licensed vaccine against the disease for which there is also no approved treatment or cure. 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.
The test, backed by drug firm Merck, the WHO and the governments of Canada, Norway and Guinea, saw 4,123 high-risk people vaccinated immediately after someone close to them fell ill with the deadly haemorrhagic fever. None of the vaccinated group caught the virus, according to study results published in The Lancet medical journal.
A second, comparison group of 3,528 people received the vaccine only three weeks after potential exposure. Sixteen of them contracted the virus, said the study, but by day six after immunisation, the remainder of this group was also fully protected.
"Indeed, no vaccinee developed symptoms more than six days after vaccination, irrespective of whether vaccination was immediate or delayed. The initial results of the study show that the vaccine can effectively contain the further spread of the Ebola virus," added a statement from the University of Bern, which contributed to the research.
"This is big news, the most promising medical development so far in the ongoing race to shut down Ebola," Benjamin Neuman, a virologist with the University of Reading, told AFP.
Peter Smith of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, "the results were very exciting and suggest that the Ebola vaccine tested may be highly effective in protecting against Ebola disease among those in the immediate vicinity of an Ebola case."