The first human trial on an experimental Ebola vaccine is set to begin in the United States this week.  The vaccine is being developed by the US National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).  Officials say it has already “performed extremely well” in tests on primates.

“There is an urgent need for a protective Ebola vaccine, and it is important to establish that a vaccine is safe and spurs the immune system to react in a way necessary to protect against infection,” said Doctor Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Initial data from the trial should be available later this year, which will be way too late for thousands of patients swept up in the West African Ebola Outbreak.  More than 1,550 people have died of Ebola so far this year, and that death toll has not been updated by the UN World Health Organization (WHO) since last week.  GSK is going ahead and manufacturing thousands of doses of the vaccine; in case it passes all tests, the doses will immediately made available to the WHO.

Also, Walter Reed Army Hospital in Maryland is getting ready for a test of a second experimental vaccine, this one developed by an Iowa pharmaceutical company NewLink Genetics Corporation.

The vaccine is different than the drug ZMapp from Mapp Pharmaceuticals in California.  That drug proved 100 percent effective in primate tests.  In practice on humans, the jury is still out.  Two American aid workers survived Ebola after being given ZMapp and then airlifted to the US to a state of the art facility for intensive treatment.  A Spanish priest and a Liberian doctor given ZMapp both died.  But two more Liberian doctors who were treated with ZMapp have pulled through, despite not having been treated in a modern American facility.