But now they’re all going to become autistic.
I’d hate to be the researchers on that trial. You can’t get good data without a control group, and of course there’s always the risk that your vaccine will be harmful. The process is necessary, and I understand that at an intellectual level.
But it would drive me to drinking, knowing that 16 people got a disease–one virtually certain to kill several of them–that they probably wouldn’t have gotten if they’d not been randomly put in the control group.
They also would have got it if they had not taken part in the trial at all.
Exactly, but I do get what TimeWinder is saying. Intellectually you know that you’ve done nothing wrong and that it could have gone the other way (the vaccine could have injured or killed), but emotionally it must feel like you’re making life and death decisions by throwing dice.
I got the Brantlys’ book from the library and read it. It’s very good, and the story ends at Christmastime, at which time he considered himself pretty much fully recovered. 
p.s. No, they didn’t dislodge Harper Lee out of #1 on Amazon. Dr. Seuss has that honor! :eek:
As for the vaccine, I believe that the trials accounted for a sizable percentage of the “people in quarantine with Ebola-like symptoms” that was reported on last fall. All of the people who took the vaccine got very sick for a few days, mostly with a high fever and body aches. David Writebol was one of them; he was quite miserable but said it was worth it for medical research, and his ordeal was nothing compared to what Nancy went through. BTW, they have moved back to Liberia! They consider it their real home and want to be there, and since they’re immune to Ebola, they can help out on a level they couldn’t before.
Several days ago, I saw a few stories online about some people who were in quarantine in Birmingham, Alabama because a patient who had recently returned from West Africa had been taken to a hospital with possible Ebola symptoms. The patient turned out not to have Ebola after all.
Ashoka Mukpo, the reporter who got it, has an open Twitter feed, and he says he met the man who escaped from an ETU almost a year ago, supposedly looking for food.
He says that’s not what happened at all.
https://twitter.com/unkyoka?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author
Here’s another Mukpo essay, this one published on the one-year anniversary of his developing the disease.
You’re about 60 plus years too late.
Apparently its not all over for one British nurse previously treated for Ebola. She is back in hospital receiving treatment for an unspecified complication ten months after her initial treatment.
BBC reports she is in serious condition.
We’ve been discussing this on another board, and one person wondered if the reason we haven’t been able to find the intermediate animal vector for ebola is because that vector is
Homo sapiens sapiens
Nothing would surprise me, really. 
Pauline Cafferkey has been admitted to the isolation unit for a third time, again with post-Ebola complications.
I recently heard a podcast where Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heads the NIH and was in charge of treating the two American patients who went there (one of the Dallas nurses, and the still-unidentified health worker) was quoted by the lecturer as saying that the unidentified patient was the sickest patient he’d ever treated who recovered. This speaker also said that the patient is a male physician’s assistant who was working in Sierra Leone.
I also found out that the American physician who had it in 1972, before it was identified, gave several interviews around the time that they brought back the first two missionaries. He too was a missionary (I had heard variously that he was a missionary or that he was in the Peace Corps) and - talk about a small world - he did some training with a Dr. James Brantly, who is indeed related to Dr. Kent Brantly. That’s his father.
He still sees patients a few days a week in the Twin Cities area. :cool: