Ebola vaccine to trial next month

Paris - 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.