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Ebola vaccine proves 100 percent effective in Guinea trial
An Ebola vaccine has proven to be 100 percent effective during test trials in Guinea. The shot has yet to be approved by a regulator, but Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has already committed $5 million so a stockpile of 300,000 doses can be produced. The results of the trial, which covered 11,841 citizens, were published in The Lancet medical journal this week. Of the 5,837 people who received the vaccine, none came down with Ebola after 10 days. (Those who showed symptoms before this time were not counted, as it was assumed they had been infected before vaccination.)
New fiber optic cables promise to bring better, cheaper internet access to West Africa
Last summer, the lone undersea cable linking West Africa to the rest of the world was damaged, forcing Nigeria to fall back on slower and expensive satellite connections, and knocking several other countries completely offline until the cable was repaired. While that has been a relatively common occurrence to date, the chances of it happening again in the future are now considerably less likely. That's because a second undersea cable project was just completed this summer, which is the first of two more cables planned, and just the beginning of a new round of investment in the region that the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union says will vastly increase the bandwidth available by mid-2012. As the AP reports, that additional investment in the region promises to not only increase reliability, but significantly reduce the cost of internet access as well, which currently costs nearly 500 times as much as it does in the U.S. on a wholesale level. Exactly how much cheaper it'll get remains to be seen, however, and there's also still the issue of expanding internet access further inland, where infrastructure remains spread thin and in the hands of only a few companies that tightly control access.
