Ebola rages on in West Africa. More cases outside the hardest hit countries are inevitable, and they could seed further outbreaks. It maybe too late for some regions, but could an effective vaccine halt Ebola's global march? What has been done so far? The tried-and-tested approach is to isolate infected people and quarantine those they had been in contact with, But unlike previous outbreaks, this one spread in cities, and cases multiplied too fast for overburdened medical teams to keep up, Where are we with a vaccine? Thanks to post-9/11 fears of Ebola being used as a bioweapon, some promising vaccines were developed. Funding dried up as those fears faded, though. Two vaccines - each made of a harmless live virus with an added Ebola protein - fully protected monkeys in experiments, One was developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), the other is owned by British pharma giant GSK. But they have to be tested in people before they can be widely deployed.
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