Ebola, the sound of the word itself sounds like voodoo magic and yet the deadly virus is more powerful than any voodoo curse imagined. The strain of virus that struck terror in Africa ended in a worldwide epidemic the likes of which has never been seen.
The last outbreak in 2014 was the worst ever since the discovery of the disease in 1976. Since then for forty years Ebola has continued to rear its ugly head now and then and it seems it has surfaced in Congo and the frightening part is that it is different from the last outbreak although scientists have a new weapon.
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The last Ebola outbreak in 2014 killed more victims than all other outbreaks combined. The virus killed more than 11,000 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Mali and the US.
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Ebola has a nasty way of cropping up every few years or so. From 2014 to 2016, it terrorized West Africa and spread as far as the US and Mali killing more than 11,000 people and affecting more than 28,000. Now Ebola seems to have woken up again and this time it is the Democratic Republic of Congo where it has chosen to attack. The region is in throes of an impending outbreak with 20 deaths so far declared by World Health Organization (WHO) estimates.
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The Ebola outbreak in Congo threatens to be different from the 2014 epidemic and here’s why. Till now health officers have used a traditional process called contact tracing to manage and contain the epidemics.
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Medical persons start identifying victims backward starting from each infected person and trying to trace every individual they may have come in contact with. All of these individuals are then monitored for traces of the infection.
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The biggest drawback in such a method is that there can be cracks in the system where some people are missed out. If someone who has been struck down with Ebola is unable to provide information of who all they have come in contact with, then that’s a bad situation where you may have walking carriers of the disease or people about to be attacked by the infection itself.
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According to the Center For Disease And Prevention (CDC), even if one person is missed out in the method that will effectively delay the containment of the disease. But!! Here’s a possible breakthrough. Health workers have now a weapon in their arsenal called rVSV-ZEBOV developed by Merck and is an experimental vaccine also known as V920.
Till now V920 has never been used for prevention of Ebola outbreaks. But clinical trials claim that this is the real thing and researchers are very sure that this will definitely work.
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A test was performed for V920 in December 2016 when WHO announced 12,000 people in Guinea were given the vaccine. That was the time when the outbreak was just subsiding in West Africa. Among 6000 people vaccinated in Africa as part of human clinical trials, none contracted Ebola.
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The only catch is that the vaccine is yet to be approved and licensed by the US FDA (food and drug administration). This is another case of the US complicated approval process that slows down medication with the potential to save hundreds of lives. Now get this, one year and a half has gone since the last outbreak and two effective vaccines exist. One made in China and the other made in Russia, The US is yet to develop an effective vaccine for the virus as officials and agencies are still meandering through the development pipelines.
Congo or the DRC can easily use the vaccine on grounds of a protocol known as "compassionate use" which is a way of providing drugs in development to people in need.
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4,000 Ebola vaccines were dispatched as part of the first consignment to Kinshasa the capital of DRC. The first people to receive the vaccines were health workers and those who were in contact with people who had contracted the virus. The contact tracing method has also managed to identify 382 people who were in contact with those infected with Ebola.
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The present problem is that the vaccine may not reach those in need of it because of several factors like the region and terrain which is a challenge for health workers in DRC. Even storage is an issue where the vaccine needs to be stored at between -60 to – 80 degrees Celsius.
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Although as of now, administering V920 isn’t a simple task for health officials, it still can play a huge role in containing the virus and preventing it from spreading in Africa. The only hurdle WHO needs to overcome are the logistics and prove that the vaccine is indeed effective in stopping the reign of terror Ebola has unleashed in Africa that if allowed to go out of hand may spread worldwide too.
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