Scientists: Ebola vaccine provides 100% protection

Baku. 1 August. REPORT.AZ/ Canadian Ebola vaccine provided 100-percent protection 10 days after it was administered in a field trial in hard-hit Guinea, researchers and officials said Friday, hopeful of "the beginning of the end" of the killer West African outbreak, Report informs citing foreign media.

The world was "on the verge of an effective Ebola vaccine," the World Health Organization (WHO) said, hailing the results from the first efficacy test of the VSV-ZEBOV vaccine among people living in a high-danger zone.

The vaccine known as VSV-ZEBOV or VSV-EBOV was tested on 4,000 Guineans who had come into contact with Ebola patients, in a joint study by the Canadian health agency, the US pharmaceutical company Merck, the World Health Organization and others.

The highly contagious Ebola virus, which has killed almost 11,300 people in west Africa since December 2013 and has fuelled global alarm, is among the most dangerous ever identified

Like AIDS, which began in Kinshasa in the 1920s before spreading worldwide, according to a recent study, Ebola was first identified in central Africa.

The tropical virus was named after a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo - then known as Zaire - where it came to light in 1976.