"There's never been a big market for Ebola vaccines." Because who cares about people in Africa.

[pnwmom]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/health/without-lucrative-market-potential-ebola-vaccine-was-shelved-for-years.html?hpw&rref=health&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

GALVESTON, Tex. — Almost a decade ago, scientists from Canada and the United States reported that they had created a vaccine that was 100 percent effective in protecting monkeys against the Ebola virus. The results were published in a respected journal, and health officials called them exciting. The researchers said tests in people might start within two years, and a product could potentially be ready for licensing by 2010 or 2011.

It never happened. The vaccine sat on a shelf. Only now is the vaccine undergoing the most basic safety tests in humans — with nearly 5,000 people dead from Ebola and an epidemic raging out of control in West Africa.

Its development stalled in part because Ebola was rare, and until now outbreaks had infected only a few hundred people at a time. But experts also acknowledge that the lack of follow-up on such a promising candidate reflects a broader failure to produce medicines and vaccines for diseases that afflict poor countries. Most drug companies have resisted spending the enormous sums needed to to develop products useful mostly to poor countries with little ability to pay for them.

SNIP

“There’s never been a big market for Ebola vaccines,” said Thomas W. Geisbert, an Ebola expert here at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and one of the developers of the vaccine that worked so well in monkeys. “So big pharma, who are they going to sell it to?” Dr. Geisbert added: “It takes a crisis sometimes to get people talking. ‘Ok. We’ve got to do something here.' ”

[uppityperson]

1. Looking down GD this am and now, lots of ebola posts now that it may be in USA again. This am?

not hardly any.

What is local gets more notice, what sells ad and air time for media gets coverage, what makes money gets pharmaceutical notice.

[mucifer]

2. Yeah, kinda like there was no interest in HIV/AIDS treatment until

it spread to non gay and non drug addicts.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

3. Actually, I think the article states it pretty correctly.

Its development stalled in part because Ebola was rare, and until now outbreaks had infected only a few hundred people at a time.

Drug companies are companies, and as such amoral. They exist to make profits, not to spend more on testing and trials and certifications than they'll ever be able to make back monetarily. If ebola were a disease that came out of some corner of America, rather than Africa, they still wouldn't have bothered to push the vaccine through until a much larger outbreak occurred.

That's capitalism at work. It's not because it's "not caring about people in Africa". It's "not caring about people". Capitalism doesn't care, won't ever care. It poisons our water, our food, our air. It's not about black or white, it's about green.

[pnwmom]

4. It's already killed thousands in Africa. Would there be a push in the US now for a vaccine

if we weren't afraid of Ebola spreading here?

[davidn3600]

5. An outbreak has never been this bad

Typically Ebola isn't even a major problem in Africa. When an outbreak occurs, it is usually a tiny region or village in the middle of Central Africa and it's easy for a government to isolate it until it burns itself out.

This time it is different and infected a much more dense population with poor medical infrastructure. It has never done this before.

[pnwmom]

6. But again, would people in the US care about the size of the outbreak if they knew it would

stay confined to Africa?

[Yo_Mama]

7. You can't test it, this is all nonsense

Until you can test a vaccine you can't market it. You can't test it because you don't have enough incidence of cases to test it. The only way to test it would be to do something horribly unethical.

That's why there is no on-the-market vaccine. There are multiple efforts that went up to gate, and now we are going to get a chance to test them.

I believe most of these efforts were really funded by military forces.

We will never have a vaccine on the market for any disease until we have enough cases of the disease to be able to test it.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. Between 1976 and 2012, it killed 1590 people - 43 people per year

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs103/en/

which is not a lot for a disease with no vaccine or specific treatment. Compare it to sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis ) at 9,000 a year, down from 34,000 in 1990. Or malaria, at something like half a million a year, with a total of 200 million infected. Or 158,000 from measles - and that does have a vaccine.

Until this year, ebola was a rare disease.

[nc4bo]

9. Rwanda.

We didn't much care about that either, did we?

Nobody really cared.

There's a history and no surprise.