From the New York Times:
. . . .[In the prior outbreak in Liberia,] the family also became the first participants in a clinical trial of a new Ebola vaccine, said Dr. Emily Kainne Dokubo, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was then the leader of the agency’s Ebola response in Liberia and is the lead author of the Lancet study.
All 120 people with any recent contact with the family were vaccinated, she said. None fell ill, and that helped prove the Merck vaccine works.
This year, the vaccine was used to defeat the most recent Ebola outbreak, which took place in the Democratic Republic of Congo. About 3,200 people were vaccinated, and new cases faded out after only about three months. On Tuesday, the director-general of the World Health Organization will officially declare it over. . . .
The twist: It was already known that Ebola-generated antibodies could lurk in the semen of infected men for up to a year. And now (due to post-hoc epidemiological research completed in the previous outbreak), we have learned that they may also be present in breast milk, and when a woman's immune system is compromised by gestation and delivery, may more than occasionally result in a re-appearance of the virus, in full.
A difficult teaching, to be sure -- but it will allow better planning "for the fire, next time". . . .
Now you know. G'night. . . .
नमस्ते
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