- Yes.

 

- Now you have any questions?

 

- No.

 

Without a hint of nerves, the first person to have an experimental Ebola vaccine takes the plunge. Ruth Atkins is one of 60 healthy volunteers in Britain to be given a jab as part of a clinic trial and she's paid just 380 pounds, not for the risk, but for any loss of earnings. The vaccine's cleared tests in monkeys, but scientists need to be sure it's safe and effective before using it on the front line of the Ebola epidemic.

 

- My 15-year-old son, he thought it was Ebola I'm having and he asked was I going to die and where is my will and how much do they get. My 12-year-old daughter was concerned but also said well done mum for what you're doing. This is that one step I'm a part of that first step and you get some vaccine they know they got the right vaccine and they can start giving it and that's gonna make a difference in people's lives.

 

The vaccine is made from harmless virus common in chimpanzees that has been modified to carry a small piece of Ebola DNA. Once in patients, the virus will make a single Ebola protein. It won't cause the disease, but it should be enough to prime the immune system to attack the Ebola virus if it's ever encounter in future.

 

- The good thing about this vaccine is it probably doesn't need to work for 5 years or even 5 months if it had higher efficacy for 2 or 3 months, that would be very valuable and technically that's easier to do than to make a vaccine that works for a decade.

 

Volunteers would be given varying amount of vaccine to find a dose that triggers a good immune response without causing serious side-effects. Normally it would take 18 months or more for a vaccine to go through clinic trials but such as the desperate need to protect health workers who are putting their lives on the line by treating Ebola patients that this one is being fast tracked even while clinic trials are underway. GlaxoSmithKline is producing 10,000 doses ready to be sent out to west Africa as soon as they get the green light. But there won't be anywhere near enough of the vaccine for local people. The Ebola epidemic is out of control in the Sierra Leone and Liberia and the doctors who discovered the virus told Sky New that thousand of people are still likely to die.

 

- One of lessons is that, of this epidemic is that we need to make sure that we accelerate the ways that we test and evaluate the drugs, vaccines also. If we would have done it in the beginning of the epidemic, we would probably already have an answer.

 

Quarantine of patients and rapid tracing of their contacts is currently the only way to beat the virus. The World Health Organization has welcomed 3000 US military personnel being sent to the region to build field hospitals with 1,700 beds. It's not enough, but it's a start.  

 

Thomas Moore, Sky News