WINNIPEG: A soldier with a fever and a bad cough walked into a Canadian hospital and was swiftly quarantined, while his blood was tested for Ebola here at one of the world's few "level four" labs.
Days earlier, he had travelled to Sierra Leone as a member of an aircrew that delivered 128,000 face shields to doctors and nurses fighting an outbreak that has claimed more than 4,000 lives.
His blood sample was sent from the Belleville, Ontario hospital to the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, half a world away from the outbreak in West Africa and one of only 15 laboratories worldwide dealing in deadly pathogens at this level.
The laboratory has been involved in combating Sars, H1N1, West Nile fever and Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and is now at the forefront of the fight against Ebola, corralling and diagnosing suspect cases in Canada, and sending teams of epidemiologists to West Africa to track infections.
It is also here in the windswept Canadian prairies that a potential vaccine, VSV-EBOV, and an experimental treatment for Ebola, ZMapp, were created.
American doctor Kent Brantly and four others who were treated with ZMapp before supplies ran out lived. Two others died.
Clinical trials of VSV-EBOV are now underway on 20 volunteers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the United States, following successful tests in primates.
The results are expected in December.
"If the Canadian vaccine is proven to be safe and deemed effective, it will stop this devastating outbreak," said Health Minister Rona Ambrose.
Comments
Comments are closed.