MOSCOW, November 6 (RIA Novosti) – The first Ebola vaccination trial in Mali is looking bright as volunteers have responded positively to the vaccines, an infectiologist in Mali said Thursday.
"We know that after two weeks they're starting to have some immune response and there are no adverse reactions," Samba Sow, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) in Mali, told the BBC.
Seydou Cissoko, a pediatrician in Mali, the first volunteer in the country, was vaccinated on 8 October at the CVD in the capital, Bamako.
"Since I received the vaccine, I feel well, there is no difference in the way I feel now and how felt before," Cissoko was quoted as saying by the BBC.
The need to constantly be in contact with Ebola-infected patients seems a motivational factor for doctors to undergo the trial, according to Cissoko. As long as blood samples give result in 28 days, the prospects for the vaccine are looking promising, the volunteer added.
There are 40 volunteers being tested with a double dosage of a newly developed vaccine by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The vaccine is kept at a temperature of about minus 80 degrees Celsius and removed from the freezer 20 minutes before being injected into a patient.
The trials in Mali are part of a program aimed at reducing the time taken for the vaccine to be distributed and used to several months, rather than years as it normally takes with vaccines for other diseases. A similar study is being conducted in Gambia involving same amount of volunteers.
According to the latest estimates from the World Health Organization, 4,818 people have died as a result of the virus out of a total of 13,042 reported Ebola cases. The majority of lethal cases have been located in three western African countries: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
