Ebola Vaccine Ready, for Trial Next Month

World Health Organization (WHO) has said that clinical trials of a preventative vaccine for the Ebola virus made by GlaxoSmithKline, British pharmaceutical company, may begin next month and be made available by 2015.

Jean-Marie Okwo Bele, WHO’s head of vaccines and immunization, in a statement on its website, said that  “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.

“We are optimistic about making the vaccine commercially available; we think that if we start in September, we will have the 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,” Jean-Marie said.

Several vaccines are being tested, and a treatment made by a 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.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s Health Ministry has said that its national who died last week after returning from Sierra Leone had tested negative to Ebola virus, according to initial international laboratory results.

The ministry said that samples submitted to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came back negative for the Ebola virus, adding that samples were also sent for testing to a laboratory in Germany.

Saudi Arabia is not issuing visas this year to Muslim pilgrims from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea as a precaution to avoid the spread during the hajj pilgrimage, which sees massive crowd of people from around the world.

However, a Nigerian man who was quarantined after he showed Ebola-like symptoms during a trip to Hong Kong has tested negative to the deadly virus.

The southern Chinese city government said in a statement yesterday that the man had “tested negative to Ebola virus upon preliminary laboratory testing”.

The 32-year-old arrived in Hong Kong from Lagos, Nigeria’s most populous city, via Dubai on Thursday, and was hospitalised on Sunday after vomiting and suffering from diarrhoea.

A densely populated city of some seven million people, Hong Kong is particularly alert to the spread of viruses after Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) killed almost 300 people 11 years ago.

On July 30, the Hong Kong government said it would quarantine, as a precaution, all people from Ebola-infected areas who showed any symptom of the disease such as fever, vomiting or diarrhoea.

Nigeria, along with Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia have been hardest hit by the latest epidemic, which the WHO has called the worst outbreak of its kind in four decades.