WHO unveils plan to fight Ebola

Scientists fast-track human testing of experimental vaccine

Bruce Aylward, WHO Assistant Director-General, speaks to the media during a press conference about the WHO briefing on the Ebola roadmap. It outlines all actions that need to be taken by affected countries and partners to bring an end to the largest and most complex recorded Ebola outbreak in history, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday, August 28, 2014. (AP Photo/Keystone/Martial Trezzini)

Bruce Aylward, WHO Assistant Director-General, speaks to the media during a press conference about the WHO briefing on the Ebola roadmap. It outlines all actions that need to be taken by affected countries and partners to bring an end to the largest and most complex recorded Ebola outbreak in history, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday, August 28, 2014. (AP Photo/Keystone/Martial Trezzini)

Friday, August 29, 2014

GENEVA -- The World Health Organization on Thursday unveiled a new road map for containing the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as U.S. scientists said they are fast-tracking efforts to find a vaccine or treatment.

An experimental vaccine developed by the U.S. government and GlaxoSmithKline will be tested on humans starting next week, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced Thursday. They will use healthy adult volunteers in Maryland, and British experts will simultaneously test the same vaccine in healthy people in the United Kingdom, Gambia and Mali.

Preliminary results on the vaccine's safety -- not its effectiveness -- could be available in months.

Scientists also announced that they have mapped the genetic code of this strain of Ebola to better understand how it kills. In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers traced an explosion of cases in this outbreak to a single funeral in Guinea in May.

They hope to use genetic mapping to track mutations that could become more worrisome the longer the outbreak lasts, and make a difference in the how doctors spot and fight the disease as vaccines are developed.

The outbreak has killed at least 1,552 people among 3,069 reported cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria, but experts have said the real number of infections in urban areas could be two to four times higher. Meanwhile, an entirely separate Ebola outbreak has killed 13 of 42 people sickened in a remote area of Congo, in Central Africa, the World Health Organization said.

WHO's new plan would cost $489 million to support more than 12,000 health workers to fight the West African outbreak. It aims to:

• Stop Ebola transmission in affected countries within six to nine months.

• Prevent the spread of any new infections within eight weeks of a case being identified anywhere in the world.

• Improve the public health responses to Ebola in any nation with major transportation hubs or borders shared with affected countries.

Ebola has menaced Africa for 40 years but previously struck in remote villages and was contained fairly quickly. This time, it has spread to major cities in the West African countries, provoking unrest as whole neighborhoods and towns have been quarantined.

WHO said Thursday that the rate of infections is accelerating and that as many as 20,000 people could become infected. With about a 50 percent mortality rate among those known to be infected, the overall death toll could reach 10,000 in the worst-case scenario.

"I think that's completely unacceptable," said the agency's emergency operations director, Dr. Bruce Aylward, in announcing WHO's plan to fight the virus.

With the world's support, medical workers hope to take "the heat out of this outbreak" within three months, Aylward said.

WHO's announcement was immediately criticized by Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity running many of the treatment centers in West Africa.

"The WHO road map is welcome, but it should not give a false sense of hope. A plan needs to be acted upon. Huge questions remain," the charity's operations director, Bruce de le Vingne, said in a statement. "States with the capacity to help have the responsibility to mobilize resources to the affected countries, rather than watching from the sidelines with a naive hope that the situation will improve."

Containment is key, but it has to be done carefully, in ways that don't cause panic or hamper the response, WHO said.

The WHO has supported the quarantine of sick people and said cordoning off entire neighborhoods can be useful as long as civil rights are respected.

But Ebola and the measures used to control it are making it harder for some of the world's poorest people to feed themselves and seek medical care.

Many thousands of people have been cut off from markets; food prices have soared, and farmers are separated from their fields. People now fearing hospitals are going without treatment for other diseases, like malaria, which kills about 600,000 each year, 90 percent of them in Africa.

The World Food Program says it needs $70 million immediately to help feed 1.3 million people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the coming months because control measures have threatened food supplies.

Nigerian authorities, meanwhile, confirmed their first fatality outside the commercial capital of Lagos, where a dying Liberian-American airline passenger infected others in late July. They said a man sickened after coming into contact with the passenger had evaded surveillance and infected a doctor in southern Nigeria, who later died.

Information for this article was contributed by Seth Borenstein, Bashir Adigun, Sarah DiLorenzo and Maria Cheng of The Associated Press.

A Section on 08/29/2014