Infectious disease. Ebola vaccine: little and late.

With the Ebola epidemic in West Africa continuing to spiral out of control, it's become painfully clear that the tried-and-true strategies to contain outbreaks in the past have failed here. This has spurred hopes that biomedical interventions like vaccines and treatments can help slow the spread and save lives. But the leading biomedical countermeasures, which still are experimental and have just recently gone into humans for the first time, are in short supply. Companies, with help from the U.S. government, are looking at ways to pull out all the stops and ramp up production; but even with an all-out effort and a green light from the early human trials, manufacturers have little hope of having enough doses to make a dent in this epidemic for at least 9 months.