This is Jonas Salk's Birthday- Now: The Hunt for an Ebola Vaccine

Jonas Salk, the man who discovered the polio vaccine, would have celebrated his 100th birthday today.

The possibility of 1.4 million cases in West Africa by January 2015 is scary, but it doesn't approach the 100 million deaths from the Spanish Flu in 1918-1920. I remember my father talking about it. He was a boy when he contracted it. His folks got it too. It seemed as if everyone in the world got it or was affected by it. Everyone wore surgical style masks when they were in public. My father's family survived, but they were lucky and his father was a physician. That may have helped.

Now there is Ebola. Certain strains have killed 90% of those whom were infected in Africa.

Keeping it from spreading to other continents is an imperative that is lost on our PC President and his Administration. m/r

The Hunt for an Ebola Vaccine by Paul Howard, City Journal 28 October 2014

We could have one by next year, but it may not be enough to stop the virus’s deadly spread.

The effort to contain the spread of Ebola through traditional infection-control measures in West Africa may fail. The nations suffering from the outbreak are poor, and their medical infrastructures are already strained past the breaking point. Many hospitals in Liberia lack even basics like gloves, soap, and bleach. Meanwhile, the American effort to build treatment units and train medical personnel in the region has been slow to launch and will likely get going too late to make a material difference in halting the spread of the virus. In a worst-case scenario, the Centers for Disease Control has predicted, there could be 1.4 million cases in West Africa by January 2015. To date, West Africa has seen nearly 10,000 cases of Ebola, with 5,477 fatalities, according to the World Health Organization. The CDC believes that those figures may be low; there may be two to three times as many infections as reported.

The American media has been obsessively focused on whether the United States should impose a ban on travel from the most severely affected countries. The problem with that idea is that a vast humanitarian disaster in West Africa would quickly spill over into other countries not affected by the American ban. An asymptomatic virus carrier could circumvent a ban by taking a plane from Liberia to Paris, say, and then Paris to the United States. A travel ban would likely push patients underground, too, limiting public-health authorities’ ability to track and treat the disease. There is simply no “zero contagion” policy possible for the United States. The real nightmare scenario for America would be if Ebola spreads to more globally connected, developing countries with public-health systems unequipped to deal with it. That would be a disaster for the global economy. And if the disease made the jump to Central America, a humanitarian disaster could unfold on our doorstep.

If the virus continues on its current trajectory, our best hope to stop it lies in the development of a successful vaccine. Vaccines against Ebola have been tested on macaque monkeys since the 1990s. After 9/11, the U.S.began investing heavily in Ebola research, concerned about the virus’s potential as a bioweapon. Various pieces of legislation, including Project BioShield in 2004 (reauthorized in 2013), and billions of federal dollars have been focused on financing the development and stockpiling of “medical countermeasures” against likely agents of bioterrorism—including hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg.

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