The worsening Ebola outbreak that now affects four countries in West Africa namely Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and most recently, Nigeria, and the high fatality rate of the disease indicate a dire need for a vaccine that could provide protection from the hemorrhagic fever.
Ebola, an infectious disease which does not yet have any known cure has a fatality rate of up to 90 percent and the Ebola outbreak, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has already tagged as the worst in history, already has a death toll of at least 600 since the outbreak started in March this year.
Family members of infected individuals, mourners who had direct contact with the bodies of those who died from Ebola and health workers tending patients infected with the deadly virus are among those who are most at risk of contracting the disease and for this group of people, a vaccine could spell the difference between life and death.
The U.S. government is apparently aware of the urgent need for an Ebola vaccine as the disease continues to spread and poses threat of spreading beyond West Africa. On Thursday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it plans to test an experimental Ebola vaccine on humans as early as September this year.
The federal agency has been working on the vaccine for the past few years and the decision to finally test it on people was apparently prompted by the current Ebola crisis and following promising results of tests conducted on primates.
Anthony Fauci, the director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said that NIH has been working with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to get human trials of the vaccine started as early as possible.
"We're trying to go as quickly as we can, given the emerging nature of the situation," Fauci said.
The phase 1 clinical trial of the experimental vaccine, which will involve 20 people, aims to assess the safety and efficacy of the vaccine and results could be available as early as January 2015. Fauci said that if the vaccine is found safe and effective, it could be made available to health workers in Ebola-affected regions by next year.
"We are starting to discuss some deals with pharmaceutical companies to help scale it up, so on an emergency basis, it might be available in 2015 for health workers who are putting themselves at extreme risk," Fauci said.
