A woman working with a dangerous virus accidentally pricked her finger. She was saved by a vaccine that had never been tested in humans
Ebola is a dangerous exotic disease common in the tropics. It has a sharp onset, a rapid course and a very high mortality rate - up to 90 percent of people die from internal hemorrhages.
A few days ago, an employee of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, preparing to inject a dangerous virus into an experimental mouse, pricked her finger with a needle … Colleagues advised her to inject a vaccine against Ebola. Everything would be fine, but the woman became the first of all mankind on whom such an experiment was conducted. The Canadian experts who developed the vaccine admitted that they actually measured the dose by eye, because before that tests were carried out only on animals.
On March 14, 40 hours after infection, the German woman was injected with the vaccine. After 12 hours, the woman's temperature rose sharply and also sharply returned to normal. After a week, no signs of illness were found.
“This is good news,” commented Vladimir Tatochenko, a Russian WHO expert on vaccine prevention. - Although it is not a fact that everything will go perfectly, because the incubation period for fever is up to 21 days. It is difficult to say about the effectiveness of the vaccine, because the experience of one person is not yet proof of quality.
According to Frank Plummer, director of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada, four of the eight primates who received a lethal dose of the virus survived after being vaccinated within 30 minutes of infection. Survived 66 percent of the guinea pigs, and every single laboratory mouse. But note: the animals were injected with the vaccine half an hour after infection. The German woman received it 40 hours later.
By the way, in May 2004 at the Novosibirsk Center of Virology and Biotechnology "Vector" a laboratory assistant died due to the same accidental injection.
