While there are promising candidate vaccines that could offer protection against the circulating Ebola Bundibugyo virus strain, their effectiveness has not yet been confirmed. The strain has so far caused two confirmed cases in Uganda and 51 in neighboring DRC.
Speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, Vasee Moorthy, a Senior Advisor in Charge of Research and Development at the World Health Organization (WHO), said two vaccines are currently under study, but one has no available doses to enable researchers to conduct clinical trials.
Moorthy said this could be the most promising candidate because it is modeled on the same criteria as the already available Ebola vaccine that offers protection against the more common Zaire strain circulating in the two countries.
However, he noted that it could take more than five years before it becomes available.
Moorthy further revealed that another vaccine specific to the Bundibugyo strain is in the pipeline and is being developed collaboratively by the University of Oxford and Serum Institute of India.
He said this vaccine could be available in two to three months, but there is currently no animal data required to allow clinical trials to proceed.
For any medical product, including vaccines, to be tested or approved for human use, scientists must follow strict safety procedures and trial phases.
Part of this process involves testing on small animals such as mice, but WHO says such data is currently unavailable, delaying progress on the vaccine trial. Meanwhile, apart from lacking an approved vaccine, the Ebola Bundibugyo strain, which has a case fatality rate of about 40 percent, also has no approved treatments or therapeutics.
Health workers are currently managing patients through supportive care, which includes treating symptoms as they develop.
Anais Legand, the WHO Technical Officer in charge of Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers, said the immediate priority is setting up systems that enable cases to be identified quickly and patients to be enrolled into care early to reduce complications.
Meanwhile, the WHO Emergency Committee experts meeting in Geneva said the number of suspected Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda has risen to 600, with 139 suspected deaths. Uganda registered only two deaths WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus confirmed to reporters that the virus remains a public health emergency of international concern, but not a pandemic emergency.
In Uganda, Tony Sekikonge Musoke, the Clinical Head of the National Treatment Center at Mulago, revealed that both confirmed cases had developed acute kidney injury, one of the severe complications associated with the disease.
The Ebola Bundibugyo virus disease outbreak was first recorded in Uganda in 2007 and later in the DRC in 2012.
SOURCE: URN
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