President Obama stressed Sunday that the U.S. must intervene to ensure the Ebola outbreak doesn’t become a long-term threat to Americans, even as researchers at the National Institutes of Health announced the start of a human trial of a vaccine to protect against the virus.
“Americans shouldn’t be concerned about the prospects of contagion here in the United States, short term,” Mr. Obama said on “Meet the Press.” “Because this is not an airborne disease.”
The largest Ebola outbreak in history began earlier this summer in West Africa. Almost 4,000 cases are suspected along with almost 2,000 deaths as of Aug. 31 across Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The president’s remarks come after the CDC chief told CNN last week that the outbreak is “spiraling out of control” and requires immediate action to contain it.
Mr. Obama said the U.S. needs to deploy military assets to help set up isolation units and protect medical personnel who are there helping to contain the outbreak. If the outbreak were to spread outside of Western Africa, it’s possible it could become a threat to Americans, he said.
“If we don’t make that effort now and this spreads not just through Africa but other parts of the world, there’s the prospect then that the virus mutates. It becomes more easily transmittable. And then it could be a serious danger to the United States,” the president said.
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The White House requested $30 million on Friday to pay for the CDC’s efforts to contain and control the spread of the virus.
Researchers in the U.S. are also working rapidly to create a vaccine. A study published Sunday by NIH detailed a promising experiment in which four monkeys were protected against a high-level exposure to the virus five weeks after a single dose of the vaccine.
The protection, however, decreased over time. Ten months after receiving the vaccine, only half the monkeys were protected from the virus. Scientists tried giving the monkeys a booster formulated in a different way from the first vaccine and saw success — all four monkeys were still protected 10 months after the first vaccination.
Researchers are beginning a human study on the initial shot early this month.
With the Ebola crisis rapidly worsening, the World Health Organization said Friday that it would try to speed the use of certain experimental products, including two vaccine candidates. The organization said that in November it expects early results from first-stage studies to see if the vaccine appears safe and triggers an immune reaction in people. That would help determine whether to test the shots’ effectiveness in health care workers in West Africa.
Small-animal and human safety studies cannot guarantee that experimental vaccines really work in an outbreak, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose employees led the work. That’s why he emphasizes public health measures such as isolating the sick, quarantine and, especially for health workers, using personal protection equipment.
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⦁ This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• Jacqueline Klimas can be reached at jklimas@washingtontimes.com.
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