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Vaccine Success Holds Hope For End To Deadly Scourge Of Ebola

Vaccine Success Holds Hope For End To Deadly Scourge Of Ebola

By Kate Kelland and Tom Miles

LONDON/GENEVA (Reuters) — The world is on the verge of being able to protect humans against Ebola, the World Health Organization said on Friday, as a trial in Guinea found a vaccine to have been 100 percent effective.

Initial results from the trial, which tested Merck (MRK.N) and NewLink Genetics’ (NLNK.O) VSV-ZEBOV vaccine on some 4,000 people who had been in close contact with a confirmed Ebola case, showed complete protection after 10 days.

The results were described as “remarkable” and “game changing” by global health specialists.

“We believe that the world is on the verge of an efficacious Ebola vaccine,” WHO vaccine expert Marie Paule Kieny told reporters in a briefing from Geneva.

The vaccine could now be used to help end the worst recorded outbreak of Ebola, which has killed more than 11,200 people in West Africa since it began in December 2013.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said the results, published online in the medical journal The Lancet, would “change the management of the current Ebola outbreak and future outbreaks.”

The Gavi Alliance, which buys vaccines in bulk for poor countries who struggle to afford them, immediately said it would back an Ebola shot once it is approved.

“These communities need an effective vaccine sooner rather than later,” Gavi’s chief executive Seth Berkley said. “We need to be ready to act wherever the virus is a threat.”

This and other vaccine trials were fast-tracked with huge international effort as researchers raced to test potential therapies and vaccines while the virus was still circulating.

“It was a race against time and the trial had to be implemented under the most challenging circumstances,” said John-Arne Røttingen of Norway’s Institute of Public Health, chair of the trial’s steering group.

“Ring Vaccination”

The Guinea trial began on March 23 to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of a single dose of VSV-ZEBOV using a so-called “ring vaccination” strategy, where close contacts of a person diagnosed with Ebola are immunized — either immediately, or at a later date.

As data began to emerge showing the very high protection rates in those vaccinated immediately, however, researchers decided on July 26 that they would no longer use the “delayed” strategy, since it was becoming clear that making people wait involved unethical and unnecessary risk.

The trial is now being continued, with all participants receiving the vaccine immediately, and will be extended to include 13- to 17-year-olds and possibly also 6- to 12-year-old children, the WHO said.

Jeremy Farrar, a leading infectious disease specialist and director of the Wellcome Trust, said the trial “dared to use a highly innovative and pragmatic design, which allowed the team in Guinea to assess this vaccine in the middle of an epidemic.”

“Our hope is that this vaccine will now help bring this epidemic to an end and be available for the inevitable future Ebola epidemics,” his statement said.

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has led the fight against Ebola in West Africa, called for VSV-ZEBOV to be rolled out to the other centers of the outbreak, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where it says it could break chains of transmission and protect front-line health workers.

VSV-ZEBOV was originally developed by Canada’s public health agency before being licensed to NewLink Genetics, which then signed a deal handing Merck the responsibility to research, develop, manufacture, and distribute it.

The success of the Guinea trial is a big relief for researchers, many of whom feared a sharp decline in cases this year would scupper their hopes of proving a vaccine could work.

Another major trial in Liberia, which had aimed to recruit some 28,000 subjects, had to stop enrolling after only reaching its mid-stage target of 1,500 participants. Plans for testing in Sierra Leone were also scaled back. That left the study in Guinea, where Ebola is still infecting new victims, as the only real hope for demonstrating the efficacy of a vaccine.

(Additional reporting by Tom Miles in Geneva and Ben Hirschler in London; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Photo: A member of the French Red Cross disinfects the area around a motionless person suspected of carrying the Ebola virus as a crowd gathers in Forecariah, Guinea, January 30, 2015. REUTERS/Misha Hussain 

High-Tech Effort Calls Up Smartphones For Ebola Battle

High-Tech Effort Calls Up Smartphones For Ebola Battle

By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

SEATTLE — The tutued young woman, the court interpreter, and the middle-aged dad wearing a jester’s cap in Seattle Seahawks colors traipsed down to the Living Computer Museum here Saturday morning with a single goal in mind.

They wanted to help stamp out Ebola. Using 10,000 or so smartphones.

Aid groups point to a gaping hole in the effort to battle the terrifying disease in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea: the lack of real-time data. How many new cases are cropping up and where? How many deaths have occurred? Where are the empty hospital beds? What supplies are needed and where?

The phones — programmed Saturday by volunteers here — will allow relief workers to collect data in the field and transmit it back to the United Nations via a specially constructed WiFi network so that aid can be sent where it is needed most. Information will be shared with scientists and humanitarian workers.

This high-tech effort, announced Monday, is part of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation’s $100 million pledge to help eradicate the disease, whose toll last week crested 5,000 in West Africa. On Monday, a Sierra Leone surgeon who had been airlifted to the United States for treatment died in a Nebraska hospital after contracting the disease.

“If we can provide an aid worker with a cellphone, they can communicate back to headquarters about what’s going on in the countryside in real time,” said Andy Hickl, senior director for innovation at Vulcan Inc., Allen’s technology firm.

“We’re taking it from six people (collecting data) in the field to 10,000 reporters from the field,” Hickl said Saturday, as volunteers in the cavernous museum building scrambled to unpack phones and download software. “If we have the data in the right hands, we can make decisions about where the next supply plane or truck should go.”

Hickl traveled to Accra, Ghana, in October to visit the headquarters of the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response. He had been invited by UNMEER’s chief of mission to help the organization’s information management team.

“We said, ‘What do you know about what’s going on in the three countries?'” Hickl recounted. “The answer was, ‘Not enough.'”

Right now, he said, the “state of the art” for information gathering in the affected nations is the clipboard, and once data is compiled, “someone has to type the information into an Excel spreadsheet and it gets sent via email at some point.”

The hope is that the smartphones and WiFi network being installed to transmit the data will help speed the response to the spreading crisis.

The kind of data that will be logged into forms installed in the smartphones falls into three categories: How good is connectivity? For example, is it even possible for sick people to make a phone call and have someone take them to an Ebola treatment center?

Where and under what circumstances are humanitarian groups operating? And finally, what is life like in the far corners of the countries plagued by the disease? Are families holding up? Who has died? Is there food?

The first phone shipments were scheduled for Monday: 600 were sent to the U.N. mission in Accra, 2,500 went to aid workers in Guinea, and 1,000 were dispatched to an aid group called Mercy Corps.

The WiFi network in the affected countries will be built by NetHope, a consortium of international humanitarian groups that specializes in bringing technology to developing regions.

“We have seen a huge drop in reporting in the last few weeks,” said Lauren Woodman, NetHope chief executive. “We believe it’s because of a lack of connectivity. Our member organizations tell us it takes three to four hours to make a phone call. … The system is just broken.”

At the Living Computer Museum on Saturday morning, Adriana Franco-Erickson, a court interpreter who lives in Kent, Wash., unpacked a steady stream of boxed phones. Her husband and daughter installed software.

They came out, she said, because they were “desperate to find a way to help fight the Ebola.”

“We are citizens of the world,” she said as she worked. “Helping control the disease in Africa will also help us all to be better.”

AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso

Ebola Strikes Fourth American As UN Ramps Up Response

Ebola Strikes Fourth American As UN Ramps Up Response

Monrovia (AFP) – A U.S. television network prepared Friday to evacuate a cameraman who contracted Ebola in Liberia, as the UN’s pointman flew to Sierra Leone, calling the epidemic the world’s “highest priority”.

Ashoka Mukpo, 33, who was working as a freelancer for NBC news, discovered he was running a fever on Wednesday, his network said, and is in quarantine in a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) treatment centre.

Hired by NBC only three days ago, he is the fourth American to contract Ebola in Liberia.

“The doctors are optimistic about his prognosis,” Mukpo’s father Mitchell Levy said in a message to family and friends quoted by NBC, adding that his son had worked on humanitarian projects in Liberia for several years.

By far the most deadly epidemic of Ebola on record has spread into five west African countries since the start of the year, infecting more than 7,000 people and killing about half of them.

The virus, spread through infected bodily fluids, can only be transmitted when a patient is experiencing the symptoms — severe fever, vomiting, diarrhea and, in some cases, massive internal hemorrhaging and external bleeding.

Anthony Banbury, head of the UN Mission on Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER), traveled to Sierra Leone on Friday for the second leg of a tour of the three hardest-hit nations.

“The only way we will end this crisis is if we end every single last case of Ebola so there is no more risk of transmission to anyone, and when that’s accomplished, UNMEER will go home,” he told journalists on Thursday in the Liberian capital Freetown.

The UN envoy said he was intent on contributing to “the highest priority for the international community — for the whole world, not just the United Nations”.

The World Health Organization said in its latest situation update there was still a “significant shortfall” in capacity in west Africa, with 1,500 more beds needed in Liberia and 450 in Sierra Leone.

Around 160 health professionals pledged by Cuba to Sierra Leone arrived Thursday, reported an AFP correspondent at the airport near Freetown.

Britain has pledged £120 million ($190 million, 150 million euros) to help build an estimated 700 treatment beds, fund new community treatment centers, support existing public health services and support aid agencies in Sierra Leone.

U.S. health officials meanwhile were monitoring 100 people in Texas who had potential contact with a Liberian man diagnosed with Ebola. Four family members were also ordered to stay home.

The man — the first person to be diagnosed with the deadly disease on U.S. soil — flew from Liberia and arrived in Texas on September 20 to visit family.

NBC News president Deborah Turness said the rest of the crew working with Mupko in Liberia were being closely monitored but were showing no symptoms.

“However, in an abundance of caution, we will fly them back on a private charter flight and then they will place themselves under quarantine in the United States for 21 days — which is at the most conservative end of the spectrum of medical guidance.”

Save the Children warned that five people are being infected with Ebola every hour in Sierra Leone and demand for treatment beds is far outstripping supply.

If the current “terrifying” rate of infection continues, ten people will be infected every hour with the virus in Sierra Leone by the end of October, the London-based charity warned.

The extent of fear which the epidemic is engendering in the country was underlined on Friday when it emerged a middle-aged man in the quarantined city of Makeni had died after setting himself alight, fearing his family had infected him with Ebola.

Neighbors said the man became depressed after his wife and daughter were taken for Ebola tests at a holding center.

“The man was heard saying he’d rather die than hear any news of his family being suspected of Ebola,” one told AFP.

“He doused himself with petrol and then struck a match to be engulfed in fire.”

By the time firefighters arrived he had been incinerated, hospital sources said.

And Germany said on Friday a Ugandan doctor who had contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone while working for an Italian non-governmental organisation had been hospitalized in Frankfurt, the second Ebola patient to be treated in the country.

AFP Photo/Pascal Guyot

Liberia Welcomes UN Pledges On Ebola

Liberia Welcomes UN Pledges On Ebola

United Nations (United States) (AFP) – Liberia welcomed global pledges of action on the Ebola epidemic ravaging west Africa, admitting on Friday that the government was losing the trust of its people with the outbreak still out of control.

World leaders gathered at the United Nations on Thursday made fresh pledges of assistance in battling the growing crisis, while the Group of Seven nations vowed to keep open vital air and sea links with Ebola-hit countries.

“We are happy to hear that the entire world now understands the urgency of the reaction to threat of Ebola,” Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown told AFP.

“We hope that the commitment will be quickly followed by action because if this drags for long, the populations of the various countries will begin to lose patience and they will blame our governments.”

Health systems in the worst-hit countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea have been overwhelmed by the epidemic, which has killed 3,000 people, and are in dire need of doctors, nurses, medical equipment and supplies.

U.S. President Barack Obama led calls for a ramped up response, urging governments, businesses and international organizations to join the fight.

UN officials could not provide an immediate tally of the total pledges made at the UN meeting but the UN’s coordinator for Ebola, David Nabarro, said countries had “responded with generosity.”

Canada announced a contribution of $27 million dollars to the effort and France said it has set aside 70 million euros in a battle that the United Nations estimates will require close to one billion dollars.

The European Union said it would add 30 million euros to the current 150 million euros it has provided to fight Ebola.

But Obama warned: “We are not doing enough” — and UN officials said a 20-fold surge in assistance is needed to come to grips with an outbreak that has killed close to 3,000 people.

“Right now, everybody has the best of intentions, but people are not putting the kinds of resources necessary to put a stop to this epidemic,” he said, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Brown said Liberians were gradually losing trust in their government with the outbreak still out of control six months after the country announced its first case.

“We told our people that this was beyond the control of governments and that only international commitment could free us from this.

“This is a serious threat for our stability and as president Obama said, the world needs to react fast otherwise this will turn to serious security crisis.”

Sierra Leone took the drastic step on Thursday of putting another three of its 14 districts under quarantine, meaning, with two districts already locked down, more than a third of the population of six million can no longer move freely.

“My country is at the battlefront of one of the biggest life and death challenges facing the global human community,” Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma warned the UN by video link from Freetown.

A UN mission on Ebola set up last week is due to deploy in west Africa on Sunday, bringing supplies and equipment including protective suits, trucks, helicopters and other aircraft.

The United States is sending 3,000 troops to Liberia to help battle the contagion and has mobilized its experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help beat back the virus.

AFP Photo/ Carl de Souza