Ebola vaccine won't be ready until 2015, says WHO

Dr Margaret Chan addresses the media after a two-day meeting of its emergency committee on Ebola, in Geneva

Clinical trials of vaccines for the deadly Ebola virus should soon get underway and will likely be ready for widespread use by early next year, the World Health Organisation said Saturday.

"I think it's realistic," Marie-Paule Kieny, assistant director-general of the UN health agency, told AFP.

There is currently no available cure or vaccine for Ebola, one of the deadliest viruses known to man, but Kieny said she expected a vaccine to be rushed through the trial process and become available by 2015.

Her colleague Jean-Marie Okwo Bele, who is vaccine chief at WHO, told French radio RFI earlier Saturday that British pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline appeared set to start clinical trials of a vaccine next month.

He also said he was optimistic about making the vaccine commercially available.

|Source: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean