THE professor in charge of Ebola vaccine trials in Oxford said the case of the Scottish NHS worker diagnosed with the virus showed how difficult it was to control the outbreak.

Prof Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, launched clinical vaccine trials involving 60 patients in September.

Marcham mother-of-two Ruth Atkins was the first person in the world to be injected with an Ebola gene as part of the city-led battle against the deadly virus.

The vaccine did not contain infectious Ebola virus material, so it could not cause a person to become infected with Ebola.

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After it emerged that the Scottish healthcare worker was receiving specialist treatment in London, after returning from Sierra Leone in West Africa, Prof Hill said: “The case in Glasgow serves as a reminder of how difficult controlling this outbreak is proving to be, especially in Sierra Leone where the largest number of British health workers are stationed.”

The professor added that progress was being made following the vaccine trials.

He said: “We vaccinated 60 people from mid-September to mid-November with the GSK chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine. This went well and the report on this trial is due out in early January.’’ The health worker who was diagnosed with Ebola after returning to Scotland from Sierra Leone yesterday arrived at a specialist treatment centre in London.

Pauline Cafferkey, who flew to Glasgow via Casablanca and London Heathrow, was taken to the Royal Free Hospital. She is understood to have been flown to RAF Northolt in an air force plane after leaving Glasgow in a convoy.

Passengers on flights she took to the UK are being traced, but officials said the risk to the public was very low.

Ms Cafferkey was part of a group of 50 NHS healthcare workers who returned to the UK at the weekend after volunteering in Sierra Leone.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she was “doing as well as can be expected in the circumstances”.

Ms Cafferkey, who had been working with Save the Children in Sierra Leone, arrived in Glasgow on a British Airways flight on Sunday, but was placed in an isolation unit at Gartnavel Hospital on Monday morning after becoming feverish.

Ms Sturgeon said that as a precaution, Health Protection Scotland had traced, contacted, or left messages with, 63 of the 70 other passengers who were on the same flight from London to Glasgow.

Efforts to contact the remaining seven passengers would continue, according to Dr Syed Ahmed, clinical director of the Public Health Protection Unit at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde.

Health Protection Scotland had also contacted and given advice to the one person who Ms Cafferkey came into contact with after arriving in Scotland.

There is no plan to test any of the other 70 passengers who were on the flight unless they develop symptoms.

The eight people who were in the “close contact group” seated near to the patient on the plane have all been contacted or had messages left for them.


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