WEST AFRICA - Ebola Crisis Update

"Ebola’s spread hastens preparations for vaccine testing" PBS NewsHour 8/28/2014

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GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  Adding to the difficulty, a different strain of Ebola has appeared in the Democratic Republic of Congo, causing 13 deaths so far.

Here at home, the National Institutes of Health announced today it will start testing an experimental Ebola vaccine next week.

For more on that development, I’m joined by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH.  He will oversee those trials.

Dr. Fauci, thanks for joining us again.

What would trials like this look like?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases:  Well, first of all, it’s an early phase one trial.

And by phase one, we mean this is the first time this vaccine has been put in humans.  So safety is paramount, so you take a very small number of people, 20 in total, three at a time, and you use the vaccine to determine if there are untoward effects, any inflammation, any idiosyncratic or hypersensitivity reactions, pain or anything that might be a red flag about safety.

And also you learn whether it induces the kind of response in a person that you would hope would be protective against Ebola infection.  The reason why we chose this vaccine is that it showed very favorable results in an animal model, a monkey model, in which it protected monkeys very well against a challenge with lethal Ebola.

So this is a first, because it’s the first time this has been in a human, in now what will be a series of steps to ultimately develop it to determine if, in fact, it is effective.

"Ebola outbreak started with funeral in Guinea, report finds" PBS NewsHour 8/29/2014

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SUMMARY:  The Ebola virus has now reached a fifth country.  Officials announced a Guinean student in Senegal was confirmed to have the disease.  Meanwhile, a new report traces the deadly outbreak to a funeral in Guinea near the Sierra Leone border.  Hari Sreenivasan talks to Stephen Gire of Harvard University about his on-the-ground experience in Sierra Leone and the latest on how the virus has spread.