MOSCOW, August 30 (RIA Novosti) - British scientists have yielded "encouraging" results from a test on monkey of a potential vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus, The Independent reported.
One of the people that discovered Ebola virus said the test result was “the most convincing evidence to date” that vaccine, ZMapp, could treat Ebola in humans, the paper wrote.
Scientists tested the drug on 18 monkeys, all of which recovered shortly after treatment.
Professor and director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Peter Piot, said it was “critical that trials start as soon as possible,” according to the Independent.
US medication ZMapp was first tested on humans in this month. The drug has been administered to two US citizens and two doctors from Nigeria and Uganda whose condition has significantly improved since the treatment. There were exceptions: a Spanish priest and Liberian doctor Abraham Borbor, who had also received the ZMapp treatment, did not survive.
The Ebola virus, which has a 90-percent mortality rate, has been raging in West Africa for months, in its biggest outbreak in history. No licensed treatment or cure for Ebola has existed until now, although companies in the United States and Japan have been developing drugs to treat the disease.
Tokyo has plans to provide another experimental drug to more than 20,000 Ebola victims, should the World Health Organization (WHO) approve. The medication, Avigan, developed by Fujifilm Holdings, is a pill that was approved in March as an anti-influenza drug in Japan and is currently undergoing clinical trials in the United States.
Ebola has claimed 1,552 lives from 3,069 cases since December, according to the World Health Organization.
The worst Ebola epidemic in history and the first to have occurred in West Africa began in southern Guinea and soon spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. A separate outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed 13 people.
The WHO says it could infect some 20,000 people before it is brought under control.
