00:00But let's bring in Simon Clark, an Associate Professor in Cellular Microbiology at the University of Reading, to discuss this.
00:07Thank you very much for your time.
00:09So clearly, global concern.
00:12This is a strain that's not as common as the very deadly Zaire Ebola strain, but it's still very deadly.
00:20Bundi, bug your strain.
00:21What can you tell us about that strain and why it's particularly concerning?
00:26It's particularly concerning because whereas with the Zaire strain, you can get some element of treatment with a vaccine, that
00:34vaccine doesn't work against this strain.
00:37So there is no way of controlling it.
00:39There's no vaccine to prevent it or treat it because you can sometimes use vaccines to do that.
00:44And there's no drug to treat it either.
00:48So really, all the World Health Organization and the local authorities can do is to identify people who have been
00:56in contact with those who are infected, isolate them and do things like swabbing people to see if they've got
01:06the infection and making sure that when people die and are buried, that they don't contaminate other people.
01:12From what we know of that area, it's difficult.
01:17It's difficult to access.
01:18There is some fighting in certain parts of the DRC.
01:24And there are small villages with a high amount of people moving between them.
01:28So how difficult is this going to be to control?
01:32With those challenges, it will be quite difficult.
01:35That makes things more troublesome, harder to get a grip on.
01:41And that's the basic problem here, that there appears to be quite a lot of fairly rapid spread.
01:48And sooner or later, it's like throwing a rock into a pond.
01:52You know, it will spread out from where it is localized into bigger cities.
01:57And then eventually, it could escape the area, escape that part of Africa and cause trouble in other parts of
02:06the world.
02:07My understanding is that while there has been one case of Ebola in the UK, that was someone who traveled
02:13directly from the DRC in a previous outbreak.
02:18How good are the controls in terms of when people leave the region?
02:22You know, it's about monitoring who gets on the airplanes, checking temperatures, and then checking on the other side.
02:29Well, there is a solid effort there.
02:31But, of course, it's not foolproof.
02:35People really only show symptoms when they're infective, or they're only infective when they're showing symptoms, I should say.
02:41And so it requires a further layer of checks in places like the UK and other parts of the world
02:48to ensure that anybody who has passed those checks locally but is infected,
02:57and they couldn't tell at the time, is picked up.
03:00Any chance that the vaccine developed for the more common strain could provide some protection for this strain?
03:07It appears not, no.
03:10I imagine there will be some work in this area, and maybe they can find something, but my understanding currently
03:18is that, no, it doesn't work.
03:20I have seen some reports of vaccines being developed against this version, but they're still very much in the lab,
03:29as far as I'm aware.
03:31And they certainly won't be rolled out quickly.
03:35Given that it's such a terrible disease, this is a hemorrhagic disease, you just bleed to death, essentially, is my
03:43understanding, and mortality can be as high as 90%.
03:47Why don't we have vaccines for the different strains?
03:50I believe there's about four of them.
03:52Yeah, because it's not that big a problem in the West.
03:57That's a rather harsh way of putting it, but it is the truth.
04:01There are other things which are a bigger problem in the developed world, and they gobble up the research funding.
04:09All right, thank you so much for your time.
04:12That is Simon Clark, Associate Professor in Cellular Microbiology at the University of Reading.
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