Authorities in West Africa are struggling to deal with the Ebola outbreak which has already claimed thousands of lives in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
Meanwhile, in labs around the world the race is on to try and develop a vaccine against the disease.
In San Diego scientists are using the blood of people who have survived the disease to try and understand more about Ebola.
Alastair Leithead reports from Texas.
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Saturday, October 18, 2014 | 2:14 PM
OTTAWA, Ontario (AP) — The Canadian government said it will start shipping its experimental Ebola vaccine to the World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday for possible use in the West African countries hardest hit by the outbreak.
The government said in a news release Saturday that the Public Health Agency of Canada is supplying the vaccine to the UN agency in Geneva. The WHO is the international coordinating body for battling the Ebola outbreak which has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa.
The news release said Canada will send 800 vials of its experimental vaccine in three separate shipments.
The WHO will consult with its partners, including health authorities from the affected countries, to determine how best to distribute and use the vaccine, taking into consideration concerns about using an experimental vaccine on people.
Human testing of the Canadian-made vaccine began last week in the US Twenty vials of the vaccine were sent to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland for testing on about 40 healthy volunteers, Canada’s Health Minister Rona Ambrose said last Monday.
The Phase 1 trial will determine if the vaccine known as VSV-EBOV is safe for human use. It will also determine the proper dosage level and test for possible side effects.
Studies have shown the vaccine works in primates both to prevent infection when given before exposure and to increase survival chances when given quickly after exposure.
Canadian health officials said results from the human trial are expected by December.
“This vaccine, the product of many years of scientific research and innovation, could be an important tool in curbing the outbreak,” said Dr Gregory Taylor of Canada’s Public Health Agency. “We will continue to work closely with the WHO to address some of the ethical and logistical issues around using this experimental vaccine in the fight against Ebola.”
Taylor said last week that the next step in testing the vaccine would be to test it in a larger human sample — most likely health-care workers handling Ebola cases on the ground in West Africa.
A small US company called NewLink Genetics, of Ames, Iowa, holds the license for the vaccine and is arranging the trials on human subjects. NewLink said in early October that it anticipated that clinical trial would soon be under way in the US, Germany, Switzerland and in an unnamed Africa country, which is not battling Ebola.
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Reports that scientists have developed the world’s first vaccine against the mosquito-borne virus, dengue fever. (Credit: Caribbean360 / Bigstock)
LONDON, England, Friday July 18, 2014 – With most of the Caribbean and about half the world’s population at risk of contracting dengue fever, reports that scientists have developed the world’s first vaccine against the mosquito-borne virus seen to work in large-scale trials comes as good news.
Research published in Britain’s Lancet medical journal indicates that over 50 percent of children who are given the vaccine are protected against the disease.
Results are reportedly even more impressive on severe forms of the disease, in which the vaccine reduces the number of people requiring hospitalisation and prevents 80 percent of cases of potentially deadly dengue haemorrhagic fever.
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Yet while experts describe the study as promising, they insist that vaccines with greater effectiveness are crucial.
Meanwhile, in this largest late-stage trial of a vaccine to date, researchers from five centres across Asia treated 6,000 children aged between two and 14 years.
At the end of two years, some 56 percent of the children were seen to have protection against the virus.
The vaccine reportedly worked best for children with certain subtypes of the virus and those with previous exposure.
There are currently no treatments to prevent dengue fever, an illness characterised by intense joint pain, high fever and severe headaches that affects more than one million people a year.
Sanofi-Pasteur, the company funding the current research, plans to apply for approval once the results of its second trial across the Caribbean and Latin America have been analysed.
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