What we’ve learned from the most recent Ebola outbreak
The most recent reports from the CDC estimate over 10,000 deaths as a result of the current Ebola outbreak. That number of deaths is more than 6 times the deaths from all previous ebolavirus outbreaks combined since its discovery in 1976.
At a recent Harvard Medical School seminar a doctor from Sierra Leone shared an anecdote that puts the most recent ebolavirus outbreak into perspective. She had spoken with a local woman whose young adult son was sick and suspected to have Ebola. When the woman got the result from the doctor that her son actually had HIV/AIDS she was overjoyed that her son would survive. In areas where there is little or no health care infrastructure and government support Ebola is a death sentence.
Stocking the armory: new weapons needed
Research on ebolaviruses is particularly hard to perform because it is so deadly and there are no approved vaccines or drug treatment options. Therefore, researchers must work with ebolaviruses in special high containment facilities. In spite of these challenges, there are many promising treatments and vaccines that are being developed by scientists as weapons in the fight against Ebola. The government agency DARPA is putting its weight behind a newer vaccine technology that aims to inject patients with DNA vaccines containing the blueprints for antibodies isolated from Ebola survivors with the hope that some of these antibodies tip the balance in favor of surviving this disease.
Many vaccines have to be refrigerated which causes problems when you have to refrigerate a vaccine and distribute it in countries that lack a lot of the infrastructure that we take for granted it can be a large barrier to getting the vaccine where it’s needed most. One major advantage of this new type of vaccine is that it would not require refrigeration is a huge deal in the world of public health.
There is promising news in the ebolavirus vaccine front from a recent article published in Science, from researchers at The University of Wisconsin–Madison and the National Institutes of Health. These researchers used a vaccine made up of the whole virus that has been made replication-defective, meaning the virus cannot make more of itself. This whole virus vaccine fully protected non-human primates from a lethal dose of ebolavirus.
To have a strong army we must fund our military in times of peace and in times of war. We should think of scientific funding like we do our military. It is not enough to fund scientific research in a reactionary manner only after an outbreak occurs. To have a strong defense against potential disease threats we must continue to study both pathogens and how our own cells work so that we can be better prepared for future outbreaks. As the current outbreak wanes it is important to remember that this is still an ongoing outbreak and that Ebola is a very real threat for future outbreaks. There is promising vaccine news on the front lines of Ebola defense but it is essential to continue to fund research because we can rarely predict what the next outbreak will be and where it will hit.
P.S. Like the little ebolavirus drawing? Check out artist Shauna Bennett’s website.