Ebola Vaccine Will Do Little for Current Crisis
Kent Sepkowitz
TheDailyBeast.com
08.28.14
The National Institute of Health announced today that human trials of the Ebola vaccine will begin next week. But it won’t be ready in time for the West Africa’s crisis.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the branch of the NIH that oversees investigations into infections ranging from Ebola to AIDS to Lyme, announced today that the first of a series of vaccine trials aimed at preventing acquisition of Ebola will be launched next week.
The first trial will be conducted in 20 healthy, uninfected volunteers at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland. They will be enrolled into the trial three people at a time with frequent monitoring of the vaccine safety. Later this year, a related vaccine will be studied, again in a small number of healthy uninfected volunteers, in Great Britain and in the African countries of Mali and Gambia, which are unaffected by Ebola but which have strong healthcare infrastructures. Very preliminary talks also have commenced to conduct a trial in Nigeria, which has seen more than a dozen Ebola cases during the current outbreak.
The news is surely encouraging, coming as it does on the heels of the news from WHO, which now is preparing for an epidemic of up to 20,000 people, including the 3,000-plus infected thus far, with 1,552 deaths.
Yet NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci was very careful to state that for the current outbreak in West Africa, the best approach will not be the vaccine or any new treatments, but rather the approach being used today and last week and last month and last year: early diagnosis, prompt isolation, and use of “personal protective equipment” including gowns, gloves, and masks.
The Rest…HERE
