Ceilidh

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

By Heber Taylor
The Daily News  

Published June 8, 2005

Here’s some major medical news with local implications: The journal Nature Medicine reported that scientists have developed vaccines against Marburg and Ebola viruses.

The immunizations were 100 percent effective in a limited test on monkeys. That opens the door for producing a vaccine to protect humans.

The monkeys were given the vaccines. Then they were given a dose of the viruses.

These viruses normally kill. But in this case, they didn’t. In fact, the monkeys didn’t get sick.

This news, had it come a few years earlier, would have been a godsend in Angola. A Marburg outbreak erupted there in March. Of the roughly 400 people infected, more than 80 percent are dead.

If Angola seems far away, just remember that we live in an age where global travel is routine. We also live in an age in which some regimes seek ways to use such viruses in weapons.

Tragedies that occur half a world away have a way of becoming frightening local stories.

Fortunately, there also is a good local story here.

The vaccines were developed by researchers at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland. The research was done in the only place it could safely be done — in biocontainment laboratories.

This is exactly the kind of research that will be done at the secure laboratories at the University of Texas Medical Branch. This kind of research is the reason that the Galveston National Laboratory is being built.

This latest study offers hope where there has been none. It’s exciting to think that similar good things may be done here.