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EBOLA

Ebola scare hits Tyrol as woman’s body found

Latest update: Ebola was not the cause of death. The discovery of a woman's body triggered precautionary testing for the possible presence of the highly infectious ebola disease in the town of Vomp in Tyrol.

Published: 17 August 2014 22:53 CEST
Ebola scare hits Tyrol as woman's body found
Ebola virus. Photo: Centers for Disease Control/Cynthia Goldsmith

The 48-year-old British woman recently traveled to Austria from Nigeria via Germany.  Her body was found on Saturday night in her apartment.

A friend of the deceased notified police when the woman was not reachable.  Police believe they can rule out a violent crime as the cause of death.

Because of her recent travels, and since the cause of death is unknown, public health officials decided to take the precaution of testing her blood and urine for possible exposure to the ebola virus.

"We have decided to seek a diagnosis of exclusion for Ebola because the 48-year-old entered from Nigeria recently via Germany, and we could not elicit the medical history of the deceased", the provincial health director was quoted as saying.

All persons who came into contact with the woman's body wore protective clothing.  The results of the laboratory tests were published on Monday afternoon, and ruled out ebola at this time.


Photo: APA (dpa)

According to experts in infectious diseases, it is extremely unlikely that ebola was the cause of death in this case, but officials are taking no chances.  This is important since the World Health Organization (WHO) believes that the number of cases in circulation has been drastically underestimated until now.

The risk of infection is extremely low. The WHO reports that all of the persons who came into contact with the previous Ebola deaths in Nigeria are under observation. Overall, the risk of infection in Nigeria is much lower than in the other three countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
 
Two cases in Europe of suspected ebola, including one in Germany, have proven to be negative.

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EBOLA

Spanish researchers develop five-strain vaccine against lethal Ebola virus

Spanish researchers are working on a vaccine against all five strains of the killer Ebola virus in what would be a world first, Madrid's October 12 Hospital said Wednesday (July 11).

Published: 12 July 2018 09:50 CEST
Spanish researchers develop five-strain vaccine against lethal Ebola virus
Ebola protects itself with proteins that act as a shield, and only exposes its vulnerable zones for short periods of time. Photo: AFP

A prototype vaccine developed by pharmaceutical group Merck is already in use, but acts only against the most virulent, “Zaire” strain.

Despite not having market approval, Merck's rVSV-ZEBOV was administered to people in the Democratic Republic of Congo in May, with UN approval, in a bid to contain an outbreak of the same virus that killed more than 11,300 in three West African countries from 2013 to 2015, sparking international panic.

For several months, a team from the October 12 Hospital has been working with researchers at two other hospitals in the capital to examine and learn from blood samples taken from three people cured of Ebola in Spain.

Lead researcher Rafael Delgado told reporters the difficulty lay in the fact that the virus protects itself with proteins that act as a shield, and only exposes its vulnerable zones for short periods of time.

That makes it tough for the body's immune system to fight the virus.

The three Spanish patients had produced “very effective” viral antibodies, though in a “small quantity” and only against the Zaire strain they were contaminated with.

Delgado, head of microbiology at the hospital, said researchers are aiming to reproduce these antibodies on a larger scale, and in a way that would make them efficient against all five virus strains.

US medical giant Johnson & Johnson is separately developing an experimental vaccine against two Ebola strains.

Delgado said researchers hope to get results from mouse experiments within a year.

The Ebola epidemic caused alarm in Spain in 2014 when a nursing assistant, Teresa Romero, became the first person infected outside Africa.

She caught the disease while tending to a Spanish missionary repatriated from Sierra Leone, who died in Spain in September that year.