10 Most Important Scientific Discoveries Of 2019

Ebola has been a horrific reminder of mankind's vulnerabilities since it was first discovered in 1976. Typically, it affected small populations within the tropical regions of Sub-Saharan Africa and usually resulted in around a dozen casualties. In 2014, everything changed, and a disease known to have killed only 1,590 people in the years prior took the lives of several thousand when an outbreak became a continental epidemic.

Because ebola doesn't affect many people ⁠— or it didn't until recently ⁠—there has been only a limited amount of study in the creation of medicine to combat it. The disease is horribly destructive, and most people who catch it do not survive. Fortunately, that's changing, as researchers recently produced two separate vaccines capable of nearly eliminating the mortality rate for a virus that kills most of its victims.

In July, the World Health Organization declared that the outbreak in Africa was a global health emergency, and since that time, two experimental treatments have been shown to increase survival rates.

They are called REGN-EB3 and mAb-114 and are cocktails of antibodies injected into the bloodstream. Their effectiveness has been shown to save approximately 90% of the people infected in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The remaining concern is that people are avoiding hospitals, which keeps the spread of ebola from abating, but efforts are underway to reduce this problem.