The World Health Organization (WHO) is scaling up efforts to combat the spread of Ebola by developing two versions of possible vaccines by January next year.
According to Dr Marie Paule Kieny, Assistant Director General for the WHO, clinical trials were underway in Europe, Africa, and the US to produce preliminary safety data on two such vaccines by December. If this is successful, tens of thousands of doses of experimental Ebola vaccines could be available for “real-world” testing in the West African region in January as long as they are deemed safe.
“I’m not suggesting at this moment that there would be mass vaccination campaigns at population levels starting in 2015,” she said, to re-emphasize that the efficacy of the vaccine would be tested among tens of thousands, not millions of people, and this would happen only if the vaccines are declared safe.
At the other side of the Atlantic, Germany’s Red Cross (DRK) has called for more volunteers to help in the fight against Ebola saying that, of the 482 who have volunteered, only 196 are suitably qualified; this is according to a recent edition of Germany’s daily Welt.
“This is nowhere near enough to keep the clinics running, we are in desperate need of help. Any donation you can make will help us do more,” said Rudolf Seiters, DRK president. He added that all personnel would have to be rotated on a four-week cycle in order to prevent infection.
Describing the situation on the ground in West Africa, Mr Seiters said it was “catastrophic,” and the health care systems in Liberia and Guinea had “practically imploded.”
The German Government, working in tandem with the Red Cross, is trying to set up more clinics in Liberia & Sierra Leone. Only last week, contributions from Germany were increased six fold to 102 million euros ($128.5 million). Still, the government plans to do more as foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has noted; “We have underestimated the disastrous consequences of this disease. The race to catch up begins now.”
Meanwhile, in the United States, nurse Amber Vinson’s family says she is free of the virus after officials at the Emory University Hospital and the Center for Diseases Control were no longer able to detect the virus in her body. Vinson was one of the two Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital nurses who contracted the disease while treating Thomas Duncan, the Liberian national who, inadvertently, imported the disease into the U.S and eventually died on Wednesday, October 8.
In West Africa, the Ebola Virus Disease has killed over 4,500 people and experts say the world could face 10,000 new cases of Ebola a week within the next two months if authorities do not pace up in fighting the disease.
By Emmanuel Iruobe
