Russian Healthcare Ministry has developed a new vaccine to protect from Ebola fever. It is produced as a powder, Veronica Skvortsova, Russian Healthcare Minister said at a meeting with Djene Kaba Condé, the spouse of the President of Guinea, RIAN reports.
According to the minister, the cure is now tested and the test results are most encouraging. The invention is very important since at the moment globally Ebola is the most hazardous disease because of its potential to rapidly become a mass epidemic, Vlada Saifetdinova, Deputy CEO of the International Medical Cluster, told Invest Foresight. When it is an epidemic, it is extremely hard to confront since the outcome of the disease is usually death. So it is of great importance to stop Ebola proliferation at its earliest stages by means of a vaccine, the expert says.
“When talking about a possibility of a mass epidemics resulting in millions of deaths comparable to the Spanish flu in the early 20th century or the plague of the 14th century in Europe, Ebola is the only disease of an equally devastating potential”, Vlada Saifetdinova notes.
Last summer, the Democratic Republic of the Congo faced a new disease outbreak. Over a hundred people were infected and most of them died. It is true, the outbreak has been local and has not been expanding (like in 2015 in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia where almost 30,000 had the disease and 11,000 died), as the world community and international organizations were prepared to respond to an epidemic. A vaccination of the people in the area was started at the very initial stage of the outbreak.
Saifetdinova believes, the Russian vaccine is superior to the exiting Western analogues (Ad3-EBOZ developed by NIAID and GSK, and rVSV-ZEBOV produced by Merck).
The weak point of the Western vaccines is existence of side effects such as headaches, fever, muscle pains, and fatigue. That was an obstacle to an efficient vaccination of the illiterate people who would see any ailment after vaccination as a curse.
The Russian vaccine has no such side effects. It is reported that negative aftereffects were only registered in very few instances (minor temperature increase was recorded in 5% of all cases). A sociocultural factor is thus abolished, therefore a vaccination with the Russian medicine has better chances to be successful in such countries.
Another advantage of the Russian vaccine is also important. It can be stored at -20C unlike its Western analogues which are to be stored at -80C. If it is a pulvis, it can be stored in a regular fridge at a temperature of +4C.
“Generally speaking, the development of the new vaccine is just another proof of a high reputation of the Russian virology”, the expert says.