UN Ebola vaccine trials to start in January in West Africa

The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) announced Thursday that if a certain experimental Ebola vaccine is deemed safe, then large scale trials will start in January 2015 in the hardest-hit countries in West Africa.
“Evidence is mounting that earlier messages about Ebola virus disease having no treatment, cure, or vaccines are no longer entirely accurate,” the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement.
WHO said that there are already a number of vaccines undergoing clinical trials that have shown positive outcomes, including therapeutic transfusions of blood from recovered patients that will begin in Liberia soon.
WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin called upon the global community to help fight the spread of the disease that has killed nearly 5,000, mainly in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, following her three-day visit to Sierra Leone.