Ebola Is About To Hit Again, Here’s Why It is Different From The Last Outbreak

5Individuals are tracked down

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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6The drawbacks

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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7The new weapon in the arsenal

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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8Tests were successful

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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