At this early stage of the Ebola breakout, you guys want to get rid of our Ebola drug and send it to Africa?
Right now, there are not that many infected. I imagine we could produce enough to give it to everyone that has it.
By Adam Withnall, The Independent
06 August 14
Authorities in West Africa have expressed outrage that treatment was given to two US aid workers in Liberia – where disease has killed 255 people
hree of Britain’s leading Ebola specialists have said experimental treatments for the deadly Ebola virus must be offered to the people of West Africa, after two US aid workers were administered with the “cure” in Liberia.
The two missionaries, Dr Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, are alive and now being cared for at a specialist isolation unit in Atlanta.
Though the pair remain weak – and there is no way of knowing at this stage how much of a help the new drug has actually been – the fact that it was given to the two Americans has resulted in widespread criticism and recriminations in West Africa.
Now Peter Piot, who discovered Ebola in 1976, David Heymann, the director of the Chatham House Centre on Global Health Security and Jeremy Farrar from the Wellcome Trust have said there are in fact several drugs and vaccines under study that could be used to combat the disease.
“African governments should be allowed to make informed decisions about whether or not to use these products - for example to protect and treat healthcare workers who run especially high risks of infection,” they wrote in a joint statement.
The World Health Organization (WHO), “the only body with the necessary international authority” to allow such experimental treatments, “must take on this greater leadership role”, they said...
We’ve already got an experimental drug, that’s for sale already in Japan, in phase III clinical trials here.
It’s a pill.
That’s already being manufactured.
Not some serum of questionable effectiveness that’s never before been tested on humans.