The West African Ebola outbreak is accelerating and could grow six times larger and infect as many as 20,000 people, the World Health Organisation warned on Thursday.
The UN health agency unveiled a new road map for containing the virus and said scientists are fast-tracking efforts to find a treatment or vaccine.
An experimental vaccine developed by the US government and GlaxoSmithKline will be tested on humans starting next week, the US National Institutes of Health announced.
The NIH trial will use healthy adult volunteers in Maryland and British experts will simultaneously test the same vaccine in healthy people in Britain, Gambia and Mali.
Preliminary results on the vaccine’s safety – not its effectiveness – would not be available for months.