AFRICA: Ebola vaccine information
Recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus–Zaire Ebola virus (rVSV-ZEBOV) is an experimental vaccine for protection against Ebola virus disease. When used in ring vaccination, rVSV-EBOV has shown a high level of protection. Around half the people given the vaccine have mild to moderate adverse effects that include headache, fatigue, and muscle pain.
rVSV-ZEBOV is a recombinant, replication-competent vaccine. It consists of a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), which has been genetically engineered to express a glycoprotein from the Zaire ebolavirus so as to provoke a neutralizing immune response to the Ebola virus.
It was created by scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, which is part of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). PHAC licensed it to a small company, NewLink Genetics, which started developing the vaccine; NewLink in turn licensed it to Merck in 2014. It was used in the DR Congo in a 2018 outbreak in Équateur province, and has since been used extensively in the 2018 Kivu Ebola outbreak, with over 90,000 people vaccinated.
—— AUTO – GENERATED; Published (Halifax Canada Time AST) on: May 26, 2019 at 09:54AM