Health groups look to fast-track
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HEALTH experts yesterday honed in on a handful of unproven drugs that they hope might turn the lethal tide of Ebola, as key figures urged that funds go for frontline crisis care in some of the world’s poorest states.
On the second and last day of talks in Geneva, the World Health Organization-led group discussed fast-tracking two potential vaccines and eight potential therapies, including the drug ZMapp that has been used on a handful of frontline workers. With no fully tested treatments for Ebola, the WHO has endorsed rushing out potential cures like ZMapp — a call echoed by African doctors battling the epidemic that has so far claimed about 1,900 lives.
“Everybody keeps asking why isn’t this medication made available to our people out there?” said Samuel Kargbo, from Sierra Leone’s ministry of health.
The WHO said “extraordinary measures” were in place to accelerate the pace of clinical trials — but said that even that would likely not allow “widespread use before the end of 2014.”
Abdulsalami Nasidi, project director at the Nigeria Center for Disease Control, nevertheless said the Geneva discussion “gives a lot of hope to the African people affected and those who are in panic.”
ZMapp has been given to about 10 infected health workers, including Americans and Europeans, of whom three have recovered. Current stocks are exhausted, but the WHO said a few hundred doses could potentially be ready by the end of the year.
But beyond experimental drugs, the key to controlling the Ebola outbreak, which began in Guinea and has spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, was manpower and medical basics.
The European Union yesterday released 140 million euros (US$181 million) in aid to combat the disease, a day after the United States offered an additional US$75 million to buy beds and bolster treatment centers.
“We need treatment centers, especially in Liberia. We need people who will be in treatment centers, but there is also a need for supplies,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said yesterday.
The American aid agency said on Thursday it will donate US$75 million to fund 1,000 more beds in Ebola treatment centers in Liberia and buy 130,000 more protective suits for health workers.
West Africa’s struggling health systems have buckled under the pressure of the Ebola outbreak. Nurses in Liberia are wearing rags over their heads to protect themselves from the disease, amid concerns that shortages of protective gear in the region are responsible for the high death toll among health workers.
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