Nine nurses and a doctor at Kabgayi District Hospital were last week relieved of their duties for allegedly violating ethics. 

Health minister Agnes Binagwaho, in a statement, said part of the suspended health professionals were from health centres supervised by the hospital who had failed to perform their duties.

The minister said the medics displayed a high degree of unprofessionalism by putting the lives of the people they serve at risk.

However, the Medical Council, and the Nursing and Midwifery Council will carry out investigations while the health workers are still on suspension.

Meanwhile, Dr Patrick Umuhoza was appointed acting director for the district hospital.

Dr Binagwaho (pictured) is quoted on the MoH Tweeter page while addressing the hospital staff last Thursday saying that, some medical workers wrongly prescribed medicine to children living with HIV/Aids which put them into critical conditions, something the ministry could not accommodate.

Elsewhere, an experimental Ebola vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline caused no serious side effects and produced an immune response in all 20 healthy volunteers who received it in an early-stage clinical trial, scientists. The New England Journal of Medicine reported last Week.

The trial, which began on September 2 and will monitor the volunteers for 48 weeks, is primarily aimed at assessing how safe the vaccine is.

But the immune response offered hope that it would also be effective.

The intramuscular vaccine was developed at NIAID and Okairos, a biotechnology company acquired by GlaxoSmithKline. It contains genetic material from two Ebola strains – responsible for the current outbreak in West Africa, and Sudan - but no virus, so it cannot cause the disease.

Because it is unethical to expose volunteers to Ebola, researchers assess the effectiveness of candidate vaccines by whether they trigger production of anti-Ebola antibodies and immune-system T cells.