This morning, I came across an article on the BBC which tells that, per preliminary results indices, we may now have a vaccine which could offer us full protection from the Ebola virus.
If this is true, this would be the best piece of news we have heard with respect to Ebola since the latest outbreak started in Guinea during the harmattan of 2013. This is especially so because at that time, there were no proven vaccines or drugs that could reliably tackle the virus, and this lacuna led to the deaths of more than ten thousand people, most of them West Africans, when the epidemic gained a foothold on the subregion.
Work on this particular vaccine was started by the Public Health Agency of Canada and it was subsequently developed by Merck, an important pharmaceutical company.
To create the vaccine, workers combined a fragment of the Ebola virus with another safer virus in order to train the human immune system to more easily defeat Ebola. The subsequent clinical trial for this drug was conducted in Guinea. But it was a clinical trial unlike the usual clinical trials. When a patient was discovered, their family, neigbours, friends, and other close contacts were vaccinated to create what the workers called a "protective ring" of immunity. One hundred patients were identified in the trial between April and July and then close contacts were vaccinated either immediately (in the case of one group), or three weeks later (in the case of the second group).
In the 2,014 close contacts who were vaccinated immediately there were no subsequent cases of Ebola. In those vaccinated three weeks later, however, there were 16 subsequent cases of Ebola.
Based on this apparent pattern of non-recurrence of Ebola in those who get vaccinated immediately, the decision now is that close contacts of Ebola patients in Guinea will be vaccinated immediately.
The good news gets better. So far, the vaccine has been shown to be safe. That means that the treatment can now be extended to children as well.
Although these positive results are only preliminary and so are being welcomed with all the caution due them, officials at the WHO believe the effectiveness of the vaccine will end up being between 75% and 100%.
If a vaccine like this one had been been available 18 months ago, some 11,000 lives may not have been lost, and perhaps 28,000 might not have been infected with Ebola.
But Ebola will come again. It is safe - and wise - to presume as much, and to work on that presumption.
And here, on the graves of all those whose dreams and ambitions were cut short by Ebola, germinates the hope, fed by this vaccine and others like it, that a tragedy of this scale can never be repeated.
