Vice reporter Kayla Ruble did an in-depth story about the vaccine trials in Liberia. I've been following this reporter because she's been working on post-epidemic stories about Ebola for about a month. The article is called "The End of Ebola: Inside the Race to Finish Vaccine Trials in Liberia," and it published yesterday.
I really liked it because it addresses the challenges the vaccine industry is facing now that Ebola cases are waning. It's difficult to determine the success rate of a vaccine if there are no cases to test it again. It's a great problem to have public-health wise, but not a good problem to have if you're working to develop a successful vaccine.
Ruble spoke with a vaccine trial participant about his experience. She led and ended with him, but the majority of her story pulled from interviews with Stephen Kennedy, a Liberian-born American-trained doctor who is working as the country's research coordinator. She also included information from a bioethics fellow at Princeton and one of the other vaccine coordinators. I thought her background on hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in Africa was great. There have been 26 outbreaks since 1976 and the name Ebola comes from the Ebola River in northern Democratic Republic of Congo. I haven't seen background like that in an article in months. I think the overall, background and context such as this has been lacking from Ebola stories.
I think she did adopt the language of health workers and few times: "human vector," "efficacy" and "NGO" veer toward jargon and probably either need to be ditched for simpler language or explained. I also found some style errors and typos, so from a copy editing perspective, I think this article could have been cleaned up a little more stateside. However, the reporting itself is solid. Her voice is clear and authoritative and it has a good news value because it addresses the issue of vaccines and hemorrhagic fever.
(The comments at the end of her story are essentially spam, and don't really add much to the conversation.)
A second story of note this week is that the CDC has changed its guidelines regarding sex and Ebola. It previously recommended that survivors wait three months for unprotected sex, but changed that recommendation on Sunday to indefinitely. It found that semen was still present in a survivor nearly 75 days after researchers had ever seen it present. This article includes links to the CDC's guidelines and quotes from a CDC researcher and a WHO official. It also included the voice of a Liberian doctor who also survived Ebola. The article was well-written and officially sourced. It also links over to an April 16 article about why the virus survives so much longer in the testes in men and the placenta in pregnant women. I like that this earlier article addresses the complications with recommending condoms indefinitely. The quote from a WHO official is great: "People have sex lives. Sexual activity should not be restricted beyond the point when there is unlikely to be a risk, as the virus should eventually disappear." Public health officials obviously have a dilemma on their hands, so I look forward to more reporting on this topic. It's more in the realm of HIV at this point, which the reporter addresses in the article. The ending is almost unbelievable. A Sierra Leonean woman died of Ebola recently, and her husband said that officials came to collect semen. He refused saying he is impotent, so they came back with a laptop and played pornographic videos while they tried to stimulate him manually with soap. A female worker also undressed him and also removed some of her clothing. Wow. What a story. I burst out laughing when I read it because it's so preposterous, but it's also so humiliating if it's true. It's a bit of a he said/she said, so I'm not sure the truth will ever emerge, but it's definitely a detail worth reporting. It shows just how crazy some of this "data collection" can be.
An article in Time, titled "Everything to know about Ebola and Sexual Intercourse," uses a Q&A story form to talk about sex, semen and Ebola. It includes information about the CDC guidelines and then walks through the questions "you're too squeamish to ask." I like this approach because it holds my attention, explains more complicated medical information about the difference between blood and semen and talks about how the CDC is providing the couple with condoms indefinitely. The question that it doesn't answer is: Is the CDC distributing condoms throughout West Africa to Ebola survivors? And if so, what are the roll-out plans for this distribution process. It was a good episodic piece about the change in guidelines, but it was short and left out some of my lingering questions.
(None of these articles has comments.)
I really liked it because it addresses the challenges the vaccine industry is facing now that Ebola cases are waning. It's difficult to determine the success rate of a vaccine if there are no cases to test it again. It's a great problem to have public-health wise, but not a good problem to have if you're working to develop a successful vaccine.
Ruble spoke with a vaccine trial participant about his experience. She led and ended with him, but the majority of her story pulled from interviews with Stephen Kennedy, a Liberian-born American-trained doctor who is working as the country's research coordinator. She also included information from a bioethics fellow at Princeton and one of the other vaccine coordinators. I thought her background on hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in Africa was great. There have been 26 outbreaks since 1976 and the name Ebola comes from the Ebola River in northern Democratic Republic of Congo. I haven't seen background like that in an article in months. I think the overall, background and context such as this has been lacking from Ebola stories.
I think she did adopt the language of health workers and few times: "human vector," "efficacy" and "NGO" veer toward jargon and probably either need to be ditched for simpler language or explained. I also found some style errors and typos, so from a copy editing perspective, I think this article could have been cleaned up a little more stateside. However, the reporting itself is solid. Her voice is clear and authoritative and it has a good news value because it addresses the issue of vaccines and hemorrhagic fever.
(The comments at the end of her story are essentially spam, and don't really add much to the conversation.)
A second story of note this week is that the CDC has changed its guidelines regarding sex and Ebola. It previously recommended that survivors wait three months for unprotected sex, but changed that recommendation on Sunday to indefinitely. It found that semen was still present in a survivor nearly 75 days after researchers had ever seen it present. This article includes links to the CDC's guidelines and quotes from a CDC researcher and a WHO official. It also included the voice of a Liberian doctor who also survived Ebola. The article was well-written and officially sourced. It also links over to an April 16 article about why the virus survives so much longer in the testes in men and the placenta in pregnant women. I like that this earlier article addresses the complications with recommending condoms indefinitely. The quote from a WHO official is great: "People have sex lives. Sexual activity should not be restricted beyond the point when there is unlikely to be a risk, as the virus should eventually disappear." Public health officials obviously have a dilemma on their hands, so I look forward to more reporting on this topic. It's more in the realm of HIV at this point, which the reporter addresses in the article. The ending is almost unbelievable. A Sierra Leonean woman died of Ebola recently, and her husband said that officials came to collect semen. He refused saying he is impotent, so they came back with a laptop and played pornographic videos while they tried to stimulate him manually with soap. A female worker also undressed him and also removed some of her clothing. Wow. What a story. I burst out laughing when I read it because it's so preposterous, but it's also so humiliating if it's true. It's a bit of a he said/she said, so I'm not sure the truth will ever emerge, but it's definitely a detail worth reporting. It shows just how crazy some of this "data collection" can be.
An article in Time, titled "Everything to know about Ebola and Sexual Intercourse," uses a Q&A story form to talk about sex, semen and Ebola. It includes information about the CDC guidelines and then walks through the questions "you're too squeamish to ask." I like this approach because it holds my attention, explains more complicated medical information about the difference between blood and semen and talks about how the CDC is providing the couple with condoms indefinitely. The question that it doesn't answer is: Is the CDC distributing condoms throughout West Africa to Ebola survivors? And if so, what are the roll-out plans for this distribution process. It was a good episodic piece about the change in guidelines, but it was short and left out some of my lingering questions.
(None of these articles has comments.)
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