Mali holds Ebola vaccine trials

Bamako – Mali’s health minister says the west African country has started trials of an Ebola vaccine on scientific researchers.
“It’s purely a scientific step. The trials are on volunteer researchers,” said Ousmane Kone.
Mali has no Ebola cases but it borders Guinea, where the outbreak began.
The trials in Bamako are being supervised by the vaccine research centre of the medical school of the University of Maryland in the United States and Mali’s health ministry, Kone said.

Trials of the vaccine started in September on 10 US volunteers and 60 in Britain.
The vaccine is being developed by the British drug company GlaxoSmithKline and the US National Institute of Health.

The WHO said 4,033 people died from Ebola up to October 8 out of a total of 8,399 registered cases in seven countries.
Meanwhile, as the world panics over the Ebola outbreak, West Africans are reportedly fleeing their countries in a bid to outrun the virus – some even headed overland for South Africa.

According to the Sunday Independent, this could place South Africa at considerable risk.
Johannesburg-based members of the immigrant communities from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, told the newspaper that there is a considerable number of people attempting to reach South Africa, most trying to reach it overland – a 5,000km trek.

One man said he alone knew of at least five people who were on their way.
The newspaper reports that it would just take one carrier to change the situation in South Africa – particularly in a community that is largely housed in the densely populated city centre of Johannesburg – an ideal breeding ground for a communicable virus such as Ebola.

In addition, these often undocumented migrants also enter the country through the porous border at Beitbridge in northern Limpopo – an entry point that has no measures such as temperature radars in place to check visitors who could be carriers.

However, Minister of Home Affairs Malusi Gigaba and Minister of Health Aaron Motsoaledi have stated that although caution needs to be exercised, it cannot be done at the expense of fuelling xenophobia.

Motsoaledi said that he feels South Africa is too far away for most people to reach by land and if they were carrying the disease, the chances are they would not make it to the border alive, reported the newspaper.

Meanwhile, as reported by News24 on Saturday, the UN special envoy on Ebola says the number of cases is probably doubling every three to four weeks and the response needs to be 20 times greater than it was at the beginning of October.

In a related incident, the head of the African Development Bank expressed concern that some donors responding to the Ebola crisis were repackaging aid money, channelling it away from other areas of need in the three countries at the centre of the epidemic.

In an interview, Donald Kaberuka said moving funds from already allocated development projects in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone was unhelpful in the long term and would make it more difficult for the countries to recover. It was treated as a small, local public health problem in a remote part of Africa with no global significance.

“I have told donors that I hope what they are announcing is additional resources because if it isn’t . . . once (Ebola) is gone we will have no resources to build healthcare systems and continue reconstruction,” Kaberuka said on the sidelines of meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, in Washington.

“We need to put new money on the table,” he said, adding that he feared that once the crisis eased countries would be left without funding for development projects earmarked before Ebola arrived. – AFP.