AN EFFECTIVE vaccine against the feared Ebola virus may be on the cards, say
American scientists who have succeeded in protecting mice against the deadly
disease. Normally, people or animals infected with Ebola bleed to death.
Producing a vaccine against this extremely infectious virus has proved doubly
difficult. The viral reservoir—probably a jungle animal—has not been
identified. Moreover, victims of the infection cannot seem to produce
significant numbers of protective antibodies against the only protein on the
surface of the virus, called membrane-anchored glycoprotein (GP).
But a research team led by Julie Wilson at the high-security US…
