1 in 10 health-care workers treating Ebola gets infected

NEW YORK – One in 10 health-care workers treating Ebola patients in West Africa is becoming infected with the disease, the World Health Organization announced in Geneva Friday in an international media teleconference at the conclusion of an emergency meeting on the outbreak.

The WHO invited medical experts from around the world to the two-day meeting to discuss using experimental and alternative treatments to combat the Ebola crisis, which the U.N. has admitted is out of control. The WHO approved introducing experimental whole blood therapies and convalescent blood serums to treat the Ebola outbreak.

The organization said the rush to introduce experimental drugs was "unprecedented" due to the severity of the West Africa outbreak and the need to short-circuit normal government regulatory processes that typically take years.

Thursday, the WHO published a list of therapies and vaccines that are now in government regulatory processes.

As WND reported, dozens of experimental drugs that have shown promise in combating Ebola in humans remain in minimum supply because of a regulatory approval process that in the United States can drag on for years and cost tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.

In a draft document titled “Potential Ebola Therapies and Vaccines,” the WHO said two promising vaccines have been tested in animals and are about to be tested in early phase human clinical trials to determine whether they are safe and induce immune responses.

The WHO invited 197 physicians, medical research scientists, academics, pharmaceutical experts, hospital administrators and government officials to Geneva for the emergency summit.

New treatments

In the teleconference, professor Samba Sow, director general of the Center for Vaccine Development in Bamako, Mali, announced he was volunteering to be the first to receive the experimental vaccines approved by the WHO.

Sow characterized the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as "a major governmental crisis equivalent to a major earthquake in terms of the health emergency created."

Dr. Marie Paule Kieny, WHO assistant director-general, explained to the teleconference the agency expects to have initial results of Phase 1 human testing of the two vaccines approved for "priority use" in West Africa by mid-November. The first doses are planned for health-care and other front-line staff in the affected West African countries.

One of the new treatments is the chimpanzee adenovirus serotype 3 (ChAd3) vaccine, which uses a chimpanzee adenovirus containing the gene for the Ebola virus surface protein. The other is recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (rVSV) vaccine, which aims to induce Ebola-specific immune responses.

A background paper prepared by the WHO for the conference indicated there is no information available on the preliminary human trials of an early form of the ChAd3 vaccine, which contains two Ebola strains, Zaire and Sudan. Human trials are scheduled to start in the U.S. and the U.K. almost immediately.

The WHO said 15,000 doses could be available by the end of the year.

The rVSV vaccine protected all 20 animals from a lethal dose of the Ebola virus, the WHO paper said, but it is not known if it will grow in humans. Human trials are scheduled to start in the U.S.