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IN PICTURES: Danish PM visits Sierra Leone

On Helle Thorning-Schmidt's landmark trip to an Ebola treatment centre in Sierra Leone, she met with Danish workers and Ebola survivors.

Published: 20 January 2015 09:53 CET
IN PICTURES: Danish PM visits Sierra Leone
PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt at an Ebola treatment centre. Photo: Nils Meilvang/Scanpix
Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt arrived in Sierra Leone on Monday as the first Western leader to visit the country since it was hit by a deadly Ebola outbreak.
 
Thorning-Schmidt met with Danish health workers in the town of Port Loko and paid a visit to a Danish transport ship used to bring UN vehicles into Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
 
During her time at the Ebola treatment centre, the Danish PM had to undergo compulsory temperature checks and wear a full-body protective suit to guard her from the virus. 
 
 
“On Monday I was in Sierra Leone to visit our workers in the fight against Ebola. They are on a dangerous assignment. Therefore it is so great that the efforts of our nurses, doctors, bio-analysts and emergency personnel is working. We should be proud of them,” Thorning-Schmidt wrote on Facebook.
 
“When you put on their special security uniform, you get an understanding for how hard it must be to work in it,” she added.
 

The PM also met with at least one local Ebola survivor. 
 
“I also met 16-year-old Isatu, who survived Ebola. Now she is waiting to begin school,” horning-Schmidt wrote on Facebook, where she posted a picture of herself with the Sierra Leone teen.

 

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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.