Tens of thousands of doses of experimental Ebola vaccines could be available for “real-world” testing in West Africa as soon as January as long as they are deemed safe, a top World Health Organization(WHO) official said Tuesday.
Dr Marie Paule Kieny, an assistant director general for WHO, said clinical trials that are either underway or planned in Europe, Africa and the U.S. are expected to produce preliminary safety data on two vaccines by December.
If the vaccines are declared safe, she said they will be used in trials in West Africa beginning in January to test their effectiveness among tens of thousands — but not millions — of people.
“I’m not suggesting at this moment that there would be mass vaccination campaigns at population levels starting in 2015,” she said, adding that none of the volunteers who take part in the trials could accidentally contract Ebola from the testing.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has already killed over 4,500 people, mostly in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, since it emerged 10 months ago. Experts have said the world could face 10,000 new cases a day in two months if authorities don’t take stronger steps to fight the deadly virus.
Data: WHO
In Sierra Leone, the government said Tuesday that number of infected people in the country’s western region is soaring, with more than 20 Ebola deaths a day. That region is on the opposite side of the country from where the first Ebola cases emerged.
And in Spain, doctors said a second and conclusive test showed that a Spanish nursing assistant infected with Ebola in Madrid was completely clear of the virus. Teresa Romero, 44, had battled for her life after she tested positive Oct. 6.
One of the two vaccines that Kieny mentioned was developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and GlaxoSmithKline from a modified chimpanzee cold virus and an Ebola protein. It is in clinical trials now in the U.K. and in Mali and will be used in trials in Lausanne, Switzerland, by the start of February.
The second front-runner, developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada and known as VSV-EBOV, has been sent to the U.S. Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland for testing on healthy volunteers, with preliminary results about its safety expected by December. The next stage would be to test it more broadly, including among those directly handling Ebola cases in West Africa.
This story was compiled with information from the Associated Press.
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