A vaccine to tackle the runaway Ebola virus now surging through central Africa can be developed within 100 days, an international disease response group vowed Friday.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) funds the development of new vaccines and is looking at potential candidates for the Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no current known vaccine.
Jane Halton, CEPI’s board chair, highlighted an urgent need for a vaccine, saying the number of cases recorded so far may be only the tip of the iceberg and a swift response is essential.
“I can guarantee you that we will be in a position to respond faster than we would have been five years ago,” Halton told journalists in Geneva, Switzerland.
“Will we achieve it in 100 days? Possibly, it’s a big lift. We are now into the many hundreds of cases and hundreds of deaths, but the truth of the matter is that real numbers are much bigger than that.”
The World Health Organisation (W.H.O.) declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern over the weekend, as Breitbart News reported.
The outbreak has resulted in 160 suspected deaths out of 670 suspected cases, of which 61 have been confirmed, according to Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) health ministry data published on Thursday.