Why there is no vaccine against ebola
Ebola
Ebola is the name of the Ebolavirus which causes the Ebola virus disease in humans.
The virus itself has been discovered in the year 1976 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Even though the virus is known for a long time there is currently now medical treatment for ebola.
In this post I will try to find answers why there isn't a vaccine for ebola and what we all can do to help!
Latest Ebola outbreak in 2014
In march 2014 Guinea reports the outbreak of the diseas. The virus is spreading to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal. On the 8th August the WHO gave a press briefing declaring ebola a international health emergency. Since then more than three years have passed and many more people are killed by ebola.
Vaccine and drug development
In the year 2005 a team of researchers published a study that shows that the virus Vesicular stomatitis can be used to fight against Ebola. [1]
But there has also been progress in developing a drug to treat ebola. A team of researchers demonstrated in an animal experiment that they can actually cure ebola with a serum containing three different antibodies. [2]
The next step would be to test the drug on humans. According to Heinz Feldmann from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) is money is the only thing that prevents researchers to start with the experiments. [3].
Because most of the infected people are from west africa large pharmaceutical companies are not interested in investing money to test the drugs. Most people couldn't afford this drugs anyway.
How you can help
The most expensive part of the drug development process is to experiment with possible drug candidates in the laboratory.
With modern computing technics this can be simulated and speed of the proces! But researchers still lack access to computing power. With BOINC you can donate your spare computing power to researchers that really need it.
You can help to cure ebola, cancer, hiv or many other things. And in the same time you can make some money with gridcoin.
Gridcoin is a digital currency like Bitcoin that rewards you for donating your computing time to scientific research!
- BOINC -- More info about BOINC on Wikipedia
- BOINC step by steps -- Getting started with BOINC
- Gridcoin -- Getting started with Gridcoin
- Gridcoin on reddit -- You can ask questions here and propably get an answer in a few hours
- Gridcoin on IRC -- Ask questions here, and you'll get answers very fast!
Resteemed and upvoted. These are the posts we need here ;)
Thank you :)
Yes, I love this post!
There is, however, a vaccine developed a few decades ago which was shelved due to lack of funding. After the West Africa outbreak, they unshelved it and hey, guess what, it's pretty much %100 effective (out of something like 3000 trials)! They are using it in the Congo right now if I recall correctly. It saddens me that something that could have saved countless lives was shelved because a government decided to spend tax dollars elsewhere.
This is why we need BOINC though! If that vaccine was developed on BOINC it might have received more visibility and might never have been shelved.
The vaccine is scheduled to be approved in the US in 2018, I think.
There are still plenty of diseases to cure with BOINC so get crunching fellow Gridsters! = )
Good news! Thanks for the information.
great and informative post
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