There won't be an Ebola outbreak in the world anymore. After multiple clinical trials, researchers proved that the newly developed Ebola vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, which was partially designed at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory is 100 percent effective.
Ebola was first identified in 1976. It is one of the deadliest diseases with 80 percent mortality rate. It is also feared for its grotesque nature of deaths -- internal and external bleedings. The largest Ebola outbreak to date occurred in West Africa from December 2013 to January 2016 with 28,616 cases and 11,310 deaths.
In 2015, researchers started clinical trials for the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine. The researchers identified people who came in contact with an infected person. At first they were divided in two groups, one group was vaccinated right away while the control group was vaccinated after three weeks. The favorable initial results led the researchers to give the vaccine to all persons at risk immediately.
The results of the trials were published in a medical journal, The Lancelet, on Thursday, Dec. 22. No Ebola cases were recorded from 5,837 people who received the vaccine, 10 days or longer after the vaccination. The vaccine is not approved by the authorities yet but a stockpile of 300,000 doses has been readied in case of an outbreak.
"There should never be another outbreak like the one in West Africa," one of the researchers who worked on the initial vaccine, Gary Kobinger, told CBC News.
"This vaccine is one tool that [many researchers] are now very much hoping will be available and will contribute to controlling the next outbreak much faster and much more efficiently."
The clinical trial was a collaborative effort of the World Health Organization, Norway's Institute of Public Health, Guinean Health Ministry, and other health institutions. The Ebola vaccine has been researched for more than a decade but it was only in 2014 that a vaccine with no major side effects to humans was developed.
