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A Liberian woman holds up a pamphlet with guidance on how to prevent the Ebola virus from spreading, in the city of Monrovia, Liberia, Thursday, Aug. 14, 2014.The Associated Press

Two promising Ebola vaccines – including one developed in Canada – could be injected into health workers on the front lines of the West African crisis before the end of this year, the World Health Organization said at the conclusion of an international meeting aimed at safely speeding up the delivery of novel drugs to the outbreak zone.

The rush to deploy experimental treatments and vaccines in the field is "absolutely unprecedented," Marie-Paule Kieny, the WHO's assistant director-general for health systems and innovation, told a news conference in Geneva on Friday, the same day the WHO released fresh figures showing Ebola's caseload and death toll continue to rise at an alarming pace.

"There is no doubt," she said, "it's unprecedented in the willingness that everybody has to move as quickly as possible, and this includes the [pharmaceutical] regulators."

Still, it is unlikely those efforts will outpace the virus, which as of Friday had spread to nearly 4,000 people and killed 2,105.

More than 40 per cent of all cases and deaths in the three countries hardest hit by the outbreak – Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea – have occurred in the past three weeks, according to official numbers that the WHO has acknowledged are likely vast underestimates.

"For me, this Ebola outbreak is equivalent to an earthquake," Samba Sow, the director general of the Center for Vaccine Development in Mali, told reporters. "It's a disaster."

Another WHO official predicted Friday that the toll could skyrocket in the coming weeks and months.

"If we make a simple projection on what has happened over the last, say, 10 weeks … and make a projection forward, then what we're faced with is not hundreds of cases a week, which is what we see at the moment, but thousands of cases a week going into next month," said Christopher Dye, director of strategy in the office of WHO director-general Margaret Chan.

The two-day meeting in Geneva, which involved more than 150 experts from around the world, concluded a handful of experimental options should move to the top of the pile. The first is accelerating the use of whole blood therapies and convalescent serum, made from the blood of Ebola survivors, to treat future patients.

"There is a real opportunity that a blood-derived product can be used now," Dr. Kieny said. "The more [people] we treat, the more we will have convalescents and the more we can hope to have more plasma to treat them."

The conference also concluded that the two leading vaccine candidates should be deployed to health-care workers and other front-line staff in the outbreak zone pending data from safety trials, which Dr. Kieny said are expected in November of this year.

One of those vaccines, known as VSV-EBOV, was developed at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg and received a green light for human trials Thursday. Canada has offered to donate between 800 and 1,000 doses. The vaccines would be deployed as part of a study in the field, possibly comparing two different doses, Dr. Kieny said.

As for possible Ebola treatments, the group concluded that those with strong preclinical evidence in non-human primates should be used in the field as soon as possible and as part of studies whose details have yet to be hammered out. It is unclear when such treatments – including the Canadian-developed therapy ZMapp, which has been given to seven known patients during this outbreak – would reach West African patients because there is little or no supply right now. There is not enough evidence yet to conclude ZMapp works in humans, Dr. Kieny added.

With a report from The Canadian Press

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