Scientists Achieve Unexpected Success With Ebola Vaccine

Now this is cool for a number of reasons, most importantly because the Ebola virus mimics HIV in the sense that it mutates in much the same way. A breakthrough here could mean a medical breakthrough in HIV is not too terribly far off:

So far the vaccine has been proven to work only in monkeys, which were completely protected against death from Ebola infection when they were exposed to the virus a month after being inoculated. But vaccine results in monkeys usually translate well to humans, and government scientists hope to launch human tests of the vaccine by sometime next year. If all goes well, the vaccine could enter government stockpiles in large quantity as a safeguard against Ebola outbreaks, natural or man-made, as soon as 2006, a decade sooner than many scientists once thought it would take to get an Ebola vaccine.