Mr Alexander Segbefia- Minister of Health

Ministry suspends Ebola vaccine trial

Rebecca Quaicoe Duho Jun - 10 - 2015 , 23:27

The Ministry of Health has suspended the proposed Ebola vaccine trial scheduled to take place in Hohoe in the Volta Region.

In an interview in Accra Wednesday, the Deputy Minister of Health, Dr Victor Asare Bampoe, said the Minister of Health, Mr Alex Segbefia, who has travelled abroad, had asked that the trial be put on hold until he returned from his trip.

The move by the minister has been occasioned by the need for further consultations, in view of concerns raised by people against the proposed trial.

FDA okays Ebola vaccine trial

THE Food and Drugs Authority (FDA), at a press conference in Accra last Monday, announced that it had given approval for an Ebola vaccine trial to be undertaken in the country.

The 18-month-long trial was going to be the first phase of a trial that will enrol 36 people to help find a vaccine for the Ebola viral disease (EVD) that infected more than 8,000 people, especially in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, and killed more than 4,000.

The Chief Executive of the FDA, Mr Hugu Mogtari, at the press conference, said the authority took the decision after discussions with international partners and with support from its expert technical advisory committees.

The trial was to test the safety and immunogenicity (indication of how the body will recognise and defend itself against substances that are foreign and harmful) of a potential anti-Ebola vaccine.

Vaccine trial

If the trial had gone on, Ghana would have joined the United Kingdom, the United States of America and seven other African countries, including Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, in the search for an effective Ebola vaccine.

Currently, there is no specific treatment or vaccine for the virus, although a number of potential treatments were being studied.

A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing micro-organism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins or one of its surface proteins.

The agent stimulates the body’s immune system to recognise the agent as a threat, destroy it and keep a record of it, so that the immune system can more easily recognise and destroy any of these micro-organisms that it later encounters.