United States health officials have said they are considering a trial test of the recently launched Ebola vaccine in Nigeria, as they also prepare to test the vaccine in The Gambia and Mali in mid-September.
The US National Institutes of Health, NIH, announced in a statement recently that it would launch the safety trial on the vaccine developed by the agency’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and GlaxoSmithKline.
The testing is expected to start on Tuesday with 20 volunteers to see if the virus is safe for use on humans.
The statement said in part, “The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has initiated discussions with Ministry of Health officials in Nigeria about the prospects for conducting a Phase 1 safety study of the vaccine among healthy adults in that country. The pace of human safety testing for experimental Ebola vaccines has been expedited in response to the ongoing Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa.”
Testing of the vaccine will be at NIH’s campus and involve a mixture that uses both the current Zaire strain and another strain, Sudan. In the second week of September, NIH and a British team will test that vaccine on 100 volunteers in the United Kingdom.
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