French press review 3 August 2015

The French press is excited by the prospect that an Ebola vaccine is within reach.

The breakthrough announced by the British medical weekly The Lancet is on the front page of Monday’s issue of Le Monde.

The respected newspaper is reporting that trial runs of the VSV-EBOV toxoid by the World Health Organisation and Guinea were found to protect up to 100 per cent of persons who had come into contact with patients.

Ebole killed more than 11,000 people between December 2013 and July last year with more than 27,000 infections diagnosed over the period. Le Monde says that the epidemic which devastated the health systems and economies of the three worst–affected countries   Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone   is still not over even though new infections appear to have been contained.

While Guinean officials working for the Ebola Enough Initiative rushed to welcome what they called “a precious present to the hard-hit people of West Africa", the co-author of the study, Professor John-Arne Rottingen with the University of Oslo, is calling for caution. As he puts it, there is still a lot of work to be done to get the vaccine approved for large-scale use against the epidemic.

He says supplementary evidence is necessary to evaluate the efficiency of the vaccine before it can be used outside the context of clinical trials. Still as Le Monde points out, experts at Medecins Sans Frontières, the French charity at the forefront of the Ebola life-saving operation in West Africa, says that 1,200 of their staff had received doses of the toxoid while the trials continue. The WHO’s under-secretary general, Marie-Paule Kieny, describes the discovery in record time, a turning point in the history of medical research and development.

Several French papers comment about the rise of Jewish extremism in Israel following the death of a teenager stabbed at a Gay Pride march and a firebombing that killed a Palestinian child.

Libération warns about an upsurge in “Jewish jihadism” eating up Israel since the 1980s. It is a trend that has witnessed hundreds of young extremist Israeli settlers being radicalised in the Yeshivas or Talmudic schools funded by the Hebrew state, and who are inflicting blind violence against Palestinians.

L’Humanité accuses the European Union of being an accomplice of the Israel’s war crimes pointing out that some MEPs have joined the Stop the Wall NGO in denouncing the EU’s assistance to Israel’s military industry. It launches a scathing attack on the British firm Elbit Systems which owns the three arms factories in Israel, forced to shut down temporarily by activists denouncing the firm’s complicity and its production of sophisticated weapons used by the Israeli army during operation Protective Shield in Gaza.

L’Humanité says it is able to report that Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, which produce drones, benefitted from European funding to the tune of 393 million euros between 2007 and 2013, adding that this is just a tip of the iceberg.

“Holidays without borders” used to be a dream, but that’s not the case any more, confesses Le Figaro, as it reflects on a 5 per cent leap in the number of vacationers hitting the road this summer. For the right-wing newspaper it is the current situation the previously prized destinations such as Tunisia and Turkey which has obliged many to stay at home.

Most holiday makers are opting for shorter, but safer destinations which are close to their workplace, a development that enables them to rediscover “the land of tourism”, according to Le Figaro.