To battle disease, apes may need vaccines

"We looked at the rates of vaccination in human populations both in host countries and potential tourists, and at the potential vaccines in development that could be used for great apes,” says ecologist Sadie Ryan. (Credit: iStockphoto)

UC SANTA BARBARA (US) — Researchers say infectious disease, like poaching and habitat loss, threatens the survival of African great apes.

Despite the work of dedicated conservationists, efforts to save our closest living relatives from ecological extinction are largely failing, and new scientific approaches are necessary to analyze major threats and find innovative solutions.
In response to this crisis, researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) have conducted a study that illustrates how severely disease threatens the long-term survival of wild gorillas and chimpanzees...

http://www.futurity.org/top-stories/to-battle-disease-apes-may-need-vaccines/

Experimental Ebola Vaccine #H5N1 #BIRDFLU

Experimental Ebola Vaccine

1. Tracy Hampton, PhD

Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.

A research team led by scientists at Arizona State University in Tempe has engineered a candidate vaccine that protects mice against Ebola hemorrhagic fever (Phoolcharoen W et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011;108[51]:20695-20700). This vaccine, which includes the Ebola viral surface glycoprotein fused to a monoclonal antibody that recognizes the glycoprotein, was injected into mice along with polyinosinic:polycytidylic acid (PIC), a chemical that activates a biochemical cascade involved in innate immunity.

Scientists have engineered an experimental vaccine that helped protect mice against the effects of infection with Ebola virus.

(Photo credit: Fredrick A. Murphy/CDC)

More than 80% of mice pretreated with the therapy survived after receiving a high dose of Ebola virus, while all mice given the immune complex without PIC died. Surviving animals showed a mixed T helper 1 and T helper 2 immune response, suggesting that this type of response may be important for protection.

[Full Text of this Article]  http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/307/5/446.2.extract