Clinical trials of a preventative
vaccine for the Ebola virus made by British pharma company GlaxoSmithKline may
begin next month and made available by 2015, the World Health Organization said
on Saturday.
“We are targeting September for the
start of clinical trials, first in the United States and certainly in African
countries, since that’s where we have the cases,” Jean-Marie Okwo Bele, the
WHO’s head of vaccines and immunisation, told French radio.
He said he was optimistic about
making the vaccine commercially available. “We think that if we start in
September, we could already have results by the end of the year.
“And since this is an emergency, we
can put emergency procedures in place … so that we can have a vaccine available
by 2015.”
There is currently no available cure
or vaccine for Ebola, a virus that causes severe fever and, in the worst cases,
unstoppable bleeding.
It has claimed close to 1,000 lives
in the latest epidemic to spread across west Africa this year. Fatality rates
can approach 90 percent, although the latest outbreak has killed around 55 to
60 percent of those infected.
Several vaccines are being tested,
and a treatment made by San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, ZMapp, has
shown promising results on monkeys and may have been effective in treating two
Americans recently infected in Africa.
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