Ebola outbreak may not end until development of effective vaccine

Scientists have warned that the Ebola outbreak has gone "completely out of hand" and it wouldn't end until the world has developed an effective vaccine.

Professor Peter Piot, one of the scientists who discovered Ebola and director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that it would not have been difficult to contain the outbreak if those on the ground and the UN had acted promptly earlier this year, the Guardian reported.

The scale of the epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea means that isolation, care and tracing and monitoring contacts, which have worked before, will not halt the spread.

There are three vaccines now being fast-tracked through early safety trials in volunteers in the UK, the US and in unaffected Mali to ensure that they do no harm. The results should be available by the end of November or start of December.

If they are acceptable, it is likely that healthcare workers - who are at highest risk of being infected and over 200 of whom have died - will be offered a vaccination before Christmas. But the only proof that any of them works will be if there is a significant drop in the number of deaths among vaccinated people on the front line.