Tampa Prep 2009-2010 Impact Defense File
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- 4. Alt cause + no harms: The root cause of ebola will be solved – gorillas are being vaccinated.
AT: Ebola 2/23. Effective and cheap vaccines for ebola are coming now – successful animal tests Science Daily March 5, 2009: Experimental Vaccine protects animals from deadly Ebola virus; may prove effective in developing the first human vaccine Protection against Ebola, one of the world’s deadliest viruses, can be achieved by a vaccine produced in insect cells, raising prospects for developing an effective vaccine for humans, say scientists at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR) in San Antonio. “The findings are significant in that the vaccine is not only extremely safe and effective, but it is also produced by a method already established in the pharmaceutical industry,” says SFBR’s Ricardo Carrion, Ph.D., one of the primary authors of the study. “The ability to produce the vaccine efficiently is attractive in that production can be scaled up quickly in the case of an emergency and doses can be produced economically.” The new study was published in the January 2009 issue of the journal Virology, and was supported by the National Institutes of Health. Jean Patterson, Ph.D., also of SFBR, participated in the research. Ebola viruses, which cause severe bleeding and a high fatality rate in up to 90 percent of patients, have no effective treatment or vaccine. Since its first identification in Africa in 1987, Ebola outbreaks have caused some 1,800 human infections and 1,300 deaths. Outbreaks have become increasingly frequent in recent years, and are likely to be caused by contact with infected animals followed by spread among humans through close person-to-person contacts. Ebola viruses cause acute infection in humans, usually within four to 10 days. Symptoms include headache, chill, muscle pain, followed by weight loss, delirium shock, massive bleeding and organ failure leading to death in two to three weeks. Ebola viruses are considered a dangerous threat to public health because of their high fatality rate, ability to transmit person-to-person, and low lethal infectious dose. Moreover, their potential to be developed into biological weapons causes grave concern for their use as a bioterrorism agent. While some vaccines show protection in non-human primate studies, the strategies used may not be uniformly effective in the general human population due to pre-existing immunity to the virus-based vaccines. In the new study, a vaccine using Ebola virus-like particles (VLPs) was produced in insect cells using traditional bio-engineering techniques and injected into laboratory mice. A VLP vaccine is based upon proteins produced in the laboratory that assemble into a particle that, to the human immune system, looks like the virus but cannot cause disease. Two high-dose VLP immunizations produced a high level immune response in mice. And when the twice-immunized mice were given a lethal dose of Ebola virus, they were completely protected from the disease. In contrast, mice that were not immunized had a very low immune system response and became infected. In another experiment, a three low-dose VLP immunization effectively boosted immune system response in mice and protected them against the Ebola virus. This finding is important because it demonstrates that since the vaccine produces immunization in dilute quantities, many more vaccine doses can be generated compared with a poorly immunogenic vaccine. VLPs are attractive candidates for vaccine development because they lack viral genomic material and thus are not infectious, are safe for broad application, and can be administered repeatedly to vaccinated individuals to boost immune responses. 4. Alt cause + no harms: The root cause of ebola will be solved – gorillas are being vaccinated.News-Medical.net, 2007 (“Controlling impact of Ebola - new vaccines could control impact of Ebola on wild apes,” 4-18-07, http://www.news-medical.net/?id=23673) Why have large outbreaks of Ebola virus killed tens of thousands of gorillas and chimpanzees over the last decade? Observations published in the May issue of The American Naturalist provide new clues, suggesting that outbreaks may be amplified by Ebola transmission between ape social groups. The study provides hope that newly developed vaccines could control the devastating impact of Ebola on wild apes. Direct encounters between gorilla or chimpanzee social groups are rare. Therefore, when reports of large ape die-offs first surfaced in the late 1990s, outbreak amplification was assumed to be through "massive spillover" from some unknown reservoir host. The new study, conducted by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Cambridge University, and Stony Brook University at three sites in northern Republic of Congo, suggests that Ebola transmission between ape groups might occur through routes other than direct social encounter. For instance, as many as four different gorilla groups fed in the same fruit tree on a single day. Thus, infective body fluids deposited by one group might easily be encountered by a subsequent group. Chimpanzees and gorillas also fed simultaneously in the same fruit tree at least once every seven days. The study also provided the first evidence that gorillas from one social group closely inspect the carcasses of gorillas from other groups. Contact with corpses at funerals is a major mechanism of Ebola transmission in humans. Together with other recent observations on patterns of gorilla mortality, these results make a strong case that transmission between ape social groups plays a central role in Ebola outbreak amplification. The study has important implications for controlling the impact of Ebola, which has killed roughly one quarter of the world gorilla population. "It means that vaccinating one gorilla does not protect only that gorilla, it also protects gorillas further down the transmission chain," said Peter Walsh of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the lead author on the study. "Thus, protecting remaining ape populations may not require vaccinating a high proportion of individuals, as many people naively assume." Walsh and collaborators are currently searching for funding to implement a vaccination program using one of the several vaccines that have now successfully protected laboratory monkeys from Ebola. Directory: files -> documents documents -> North Mankato Taylor Library documents -> In the Red and Brown Water documents -> - documents -> I. Disaster Summary Sheet II. 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