A vaccine developed by Merck & Co. and NewLink Genetics Corp. and dubbed VSV-ZEBOV appears to have a 100% vaccination success rate against the deadly Ebola virus. This marks a monumental breakthrough in vaccination technology and will hopefully eradicate the current West Africa epidemic.

"It's a wonderful result and a fantastic illustration of how vaccines can be developed very quickly and can be used in an outbreak situation to control the disease," says Adrian Hill, a vaccine researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom
"This will go down in history as one of those hallmark public health efforts," says Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Twin Cities, Minnesota. "We will teach about this in public health schools."
The vaccine, dubbed VSV-ZEBOV, is one of a handful of vaccines and drugs that were rushed into bigger studies after a big Ebola outbreak hit West Africa last year. It consists of the Vesicular Stomatitis Virus (VSV), which causes disease in livestock, with the Ebola surface protein stitched into it.
Instead of a traditional trial structure, this vaccine was tested using 90 rings of people in contact with new Ebola patients. These clusters were randomised and in 48 of the cases the vaccination was administered as soon as possible, while in the other cases it came 21 days later. The results were astonishing with zero new cases among the 2014 people who were vaccinated straight away, and 16 cases amongst the 2380 who got the shot 3 weeks later. This means that, at least according to this study, there is a 100% efficiency with this new vaccine.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 27,780 people have been infected and about 11,290 have died of Ebola in the outbreak of the virus in Africa last year. WHO director Margaret Chan called the study "exciting" but cautioned that follow-up studies are needed. "If proven effective this is going to be a game-changer. It will change the management of the current Ebola outbreak and future outbreaks."
The virus is waning in the recent weeks and is at its lowest in well over a year, but WHO has warned that the disease can easily flare up again. There were only 12 cases one week in May, for instance, but the virus bounced back to more than 30 cases per week in July. In any case, the new vaccine offers hope that the Ebola virus can be prevented and perhaps even eradicated once and for all.
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