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The US Food and Drug administration has approved for the first time in the United States a vaccine for the prevention of the deadly Ebola virus, the agency announced Thursday. The vaccine, Ervebo, was developed by Merck and protects against Ebola virus disease (EVD) caused by Zaire ebolavirus in people 18 and older, the FDA said in a statement. Cases of EVD in the US are very rare and have generally occurred when people already infected with the virus have traveled into the country or when health care workers have become infected treating those sickened by EVD. "While the risk...

Scientists battling the deadly Ebola virus are poised for a breakthrough in the new year after an experimental vaccine shot proved to be 100-percent effective during a trial in West Africa and received fast-track status from the Food and Drug Administration.

News.com.au: Patients’ pain ends Ebola vaccine trial in Switzerland 3 minutes ago "A CLINICAL trial of an Ebola vaccine has finished early after some patients started complaining of joint pain. The trial was stopped a week early in all 59 volunteers “as a measure of precaution”, the University of …"

U.S. agency offers legal immunity to Ebola vaccine makers Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia Burwell made the announcement as part of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act in a move aimed at encouraging the development and availability of experimental Ebola …

Trials of a vaccine against Ebola show that it is safe and able to trigger an immune response against the virus In the first results from tests on an experimental Ebola vaccine, researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) report for the first time Wednesday that the shot is safe and that it leads to an immune response among healthy volunteers. The vaccine, developed by the National Institutes of Health and GlaxoSmithKline, was tested in 20 participants in the US at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda. “This tells us that this is kind of a...

An experimental Ebola vaccine appears safe and triggered signs of immune protection in the first 20 volunteers to test it, U.S. researchers reported Wednesday. The vaccine is designed to spur the immune system's production of anti-Ebola antibodies, and people developed them within four weeks of getting the shots at the National Institutes of Health. Half of the test group received a higher-dose shot, and those people produced more antibodies, said the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Some people also developed a different set of virus-fighting immune cells, named T cells, the study found.

Scientists have demonstrated for the first time that a single-dose, needleless Ebola vaccine given to primates through their noses and lungs protected them against infection for at least 21 weeks.

Man injects himself with Ebola DELIBERATELY in a bid to battle the deadly diseaseA man has revealed he has been injected with the Ebola virus ON PURPOSE in a bid to fight the deadly disease. Peter Hubbard said he hopes the small risk he is taking could help create a vaccine to prevent further outbreaks of the disease, which has claimed thousands of lives in west Africa. Speaking from his apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, Mr Hubbard, a consultant who specialises in natural gas and peer markets, said: "I get a lot of satisfaction out of the fact that this could...

The Australian government recommends for Australians to reconsider their need for travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, because of a new string of Ebola virus spreading in the region. The said string of Ebola is different from the deadly virus that is widely spread in West African countries. For those Australians already in DRC, they should be aware that many African countries had banned travelers coming from heavily infected areas. According to the World Health Organisation, or WHO, the virus in DRC was identified to have come from Zaire species, a string that could have evolved...

Submitted by Brandon Smith of Alt-Market.com, One of the most dangerous philosophical contentions even amongst liberty movement activists is the conundrum of government force and prevention during times of imminent pandemic. All of us at one time or another have had this debate. If a legitimate viral threat existed and threatened to infect and kill millions of Americans, is it then acceptable for the government to step in, remove civil liberties, enforce quarantines, and stop people from spreading the disease? After all, during a viral event, the decisions of each individual can truly have a positive or negative effect on...

At least 4,877 people have died in the world's worst recorded outbreak of Ebola, and at least 9,936 cases of the disease had been recorded as of Oct. 19, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday, but the true toll may be three times as much. The WHO has said real numbers of cases are believed to be much higher than reported: by a factor of 1.5 in Guinea, 2 in Sierra Leone and 2.5 in Liberia, while the death rate is thought to be about 70 percent of all cases. That would suggest a toll of almost 15,000.

I have spent a little time compiling links to threads about the Ebola outbreak in the interest of having all the links in one thread for future reference. Please add links to new threads and articles of interest as the situation develops. Thank You all for you participation.

Thomas Geisbert spent the ’90s scraping together funds to work on an Ebola cure. Occasionally, he’d get enough to test a potential vaccine in primates, but the monkeys always died. There was just never enough money. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Dick Cheney helped change that. Cheney, then the vice president, said he feared assaults by bioterrorists could be far more devastating than what happened that day, and became an advocate in the George W. Bush White House At least seven drugs now being tested -- including some used to treat Ebola victims in the U.S. -- grew...

The empirical evidence of an airborne Ebola Strain is overwhelming Hat Tip GWP - Patrick Sawyer was the American businessman, who contracted Ebola while working in Liberia, then collapsed after he got off a plane to Nigeria and died July 25. He was the first patient in Nigeria with the Ebola virus. The Nigerian authorities have refused to release the names of other passengers on the plane with Mr. Sawyer, or notify the media of their status.

U.S. Army warns of potential 'airborne' Ebola Virus could be transmitted by means other than contact NEW YORK – While Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization officials continue to insist Ebola cannot be transmitted by air from one person to another, an Army manual clearly warns the virus could be an airborne threat in certain circumstances. The handbook published by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, USAMRID, titled “USAMRID’s Medical Management of Biological Casualties Handbook,” is now in its seventh edition. The most recent edition was published in 2011, with more than 100,000 copies distributed...

Kevin LoriaOctober 6, 2014 The idea that Ebola could go airborne is terrifying. Once you are infected, few diseases are more likely to kill you — and death by hemorrhagic fever, diarrhea and vomiting often accompanied by bleeding and organ failure, sounds particularly awful. At present it's hard to get infected — healthcare workers and family members caring for victims are at highest risk — but that would change if the virus were to mutate so that it could be transmitted through the air while keeping its present lethality. That's a nightmare scenario. But it's more the stuff of bad...

Bloomberg - link and title only.

<p>Muslim burial practices are being blamed for the spread of Ebola.</p> <p>Remains of Secretary General of The Nigeria Supreme General for Islamic Affairs and Seriki of Egbaland, Alhaji Lateeef Adegbite at his burial in 2012.</p> <p>Islam requires family members to personally wash the corpses of loved ones from head to toe. This practise is putting more Africans at risk to catch the disease that is spread by body fluids.</p>

The pitch was intriguing: U.S. health officials wanted to fast-track trials for an Ebola vaccine and sounded the call for volunteers. Charles Sullivan called up the hotline on a whim, figuring the National Institutes of Health already had filled its queue and wouldn’t need him. But he was accepted for three rounds of shots of a deactivated virus, a year’s worth of blood analysis and a $900 check for his trouble. The clinical trial went well, and the vaccine seemed promising. A decade later, the country is still waiting for a vaccine amid a worldwide Ebola outbreak, and Mr. Sullivan...

We have technology to potentially control Ebola and other viral outbreaks today. But the federal bureaucracy refuses to catch up with 21st-century science. For example, diagnostic startup Nanobiosym has an iPhone-sized device that can accurately detect Ebola and other infectious diseases in less than an hour. Two other companies, Synthetic Genomics and Novartis, have the capacity to create synthetic vaccine viruses for influenza and other infectious diseases in only four days. Both firms can also share data about outbreaks instantaneously and make real-time, geographically specific diagnosis and vaccine production possible. These companies could start producing Ebola vaccine/treatments tomorrow — except...