Doctor of cured anthrax patient: 'It was horrendous'

USA Today ^ | Oct. 25, 2001 | Rita Rubin

[aristeides]

Doctor of cured anthrax patient: 'It was horrendous'

Carlos Omenaca sees three or four bad cases of pneumonia a day in his Miami medical practice.

"The question that you ask yourself is, 'What is the organism that is causing this type of pneumonia?' " says Omenaca, an infectious-disease specialist.

[Cicero]

The basic ethical rule is that medical experimentation is justified if it has a good chance of improving the health or life-expectancy of the particular patient on which it is being tested. It is NOT kosher to experiment on someone to help somebody else, if it puts that particular patient's health at significantly greater risk than withholding experimental treatment.

In other words, using an experimental anthrax antitoxin would probably be justified in the case of someone with an advanced anthrax infection, because it would improve his chances as well as benefitting others in the future.

[vrwc54]

Bump

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

By the time they get thru the FDA Phase I, Phase II and Phase III clinical trials, years will have passed by!

[aristeides]

If those FDA rules can ever be streamlined, wartime is surely the time!