The 2014 EBOLA outbreak took new turns Friday with another gloomy update from the World Health Organization on the current epidemic in West Africa. And British pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has also conveyed a gloomy warning that a safe vaccine will be too late for the progress of the ongoing spread of the deadly virus.
GlaxoSmithKline is one of the many pharmaceutical companies attempting to develop a vaccine to prevent the spread of EBOLA in West Africa this 2014. The World Health Organization updated the outbreak has infected over 9,000 people and caused more than 4,000 deaths.
According to BBC News, healthcare workers around the world, particularly in West Africa, are struggling to control the spread of EBOLA, which has caused an outbreak this 2014, affecting people in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. And WHO has recently updated there could soon be 10,000 new cases of the virus per week.
Top experts who have previously engaged in EBOLA believed the only way to contain the epidemic is with a vaccine. However, GSK's EBOLA vaccine research head Dr. Ripley Ballou, said full data on its safety and efficacy would not be ready until late 2015 while full-scale production for general use won't happen until well into 2016.
As stated by The News Tribune, according to WHO's update a month ago, it hoped that clinical trials on the two vaccines would be available by next month. And the vaccines would be available for use by healthcare workers to contain the EBOLA outbreak by January.
GlaxoSmithKline's Ebola CAd3 vaccine was one of the two vaccines. The other was the VSV vaccine, made by NewLink Genetics Corp., which is based in Ames, Iowa. The GlaxoSmithKline vaccine has been technologically established in partnership with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The Independent UK reported a GSK spokesperson said the first phase of trials with GSK/NIH vaccine were underway in the US, the UK and Mali, while further test were due to start in the coming weeks. But GSK's head for EBOLA vaccine research emphasized the necessary data and manufacturing levels will not be ready until next year or even the year after.
"To have a vaccine that people can use, you have to have the vaccine registered and it has to be manufactured on a scale that is consistent with the intended use," Dr. Ripley Ballou told BBC Radio 4's File on Four. "It is going to be well into next year if not the year beyond before we have that kind of level of manufacturing and the data that is necessary."
Ballou's evaluation worried experts at the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, which has more than 3,000 staff members fighting the EBOLA outbreak this 2014 in the three worst-struck nations: Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The organization urged GSK to step up its efforts, which on an update has at least 16 workers that have been infected with the deadly virus.
"This is a disaster scenario," the organization's executive director for drug access, Manica Balasegaram said. "We want to see serious acceleration. We need to be more ambitious. It's worrying to hear timelines into 2016. We have got to accelerate. The situation on the ground is a catastrophe."
Doctors Without Borders has 60 centers in the affected nations and so far it had treated over 4,500 patients.
GSK's spokeswoman Catherine Hartley said the pharmaceutical firm is working as fast as it can. She added the company has started manufacturing 10,000 doses of the vaccine so that it can move quickly to the second stage of clinical trials if the first ones are successful.
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Director, Professor Peter Piot, who first discovered EBOLA in 1976, said he is alarmed the EBOLA outbreak could last well into next year.
"Then only a vaccine can stop it, but we still have to prove that this vaccine protects, we don't know that for sure," he said.
On the downside, the development of the vaccination trials came as WHO released its latest update on the progress of the outbreak. As of Tuesday, the agency said EBOLA has already been detected in seven nations including Spain and the US. WHO also said that 219 more infections had been reported since the last report published on Oct.15, 2014, escalating the total number of confirmed cases to 9,216, which 4,555 people have died.
The WHO latest update added three medical workers who have died from EBOLA since the outbreak totaling to 239. On a much brighter side, Nigeria and Senegal have been considered EBOLA-free this 2014.
In line with the latest EBOLA updates, if GSK's vaccine does not work this 2014, other EBOLA vaccines are being developed by several researchers in Japan and Canada that could provide hope for future outbreaks.
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