Speculation about the experimental treatment that was given to two Ebola-infected US citizens, along with panic over Ebola — unwarranted in the United States, more logical in West Africa — has people questioning why something that many have said may have cured the two Americans was given only to them, while the African body count continues to climb.
"This is something that has made our job most difficult," Tolbert Nyenswah, Liberia's assistant health minister, told the Wall Street Journal. "The population here is asking: 'You said there was no cure for Ebola, but the Americans are curing it?'"
The supportive medical care that they received — and had access to, unlike many Africans suffering from the disease — may have had just as much to do with the fact that their condition is reportedly improving.
It's important to note that the treatment had not been tested on humans ever before. Larry Zeitlin, the president of Mapp Biopharmaceuticals, the company that developed the treatment, told Business Insider that the results of studies on the therapy have not even been published yet.
A treatment that's never been tested on humans might only not work, it could potentially have fatal side effects — which is why Writebol and Brantly had to provide consent saying they understood the risks of being injected with an unknown drug.
It should also be noted that the medicine given to Brantly and Writebol was arranged by Samaritan's Purse, not the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the U.S. government.
Pharmaceutical companies may hesitate to start distributing untested drugs into an epidemic that the world is watching — some have a bad history of testing drugs on people in Africa and Asia who don't even know they are being experimented on, sometimes with fatal results.
Still, an outbreak of a disease that can kill up to 90% of infected patients — the fatality rate in West Africa is currently 60% — has many saying that now is the time to deploy experimental drugs just in case they work.
Top Ebola experts Peter Piot, who co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976; David L. Heymann of the Chatham House Center on Global Health Security; and Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust recently released a statement saying that infected Africans should be given the same choice as the two Americans: to try an experimental drug, even one that has unknown risks.
The picture might be very different if the heart of the outbreak were closer to home, they said: "It is highly likely that if Ebola were now spreading in Western countries, public health authorities would give at-risk patients access to experimental drugs or vaccines."
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