Three of the world's leading Ebola specialists have called for
experimental drugs and vaccines to be offered to people in West
Africa, where a vast outbreak of the deadly disease is raging in three
countries.
Noting that American aid workers who contracted the disease in Liberia
were given an unapproved medicine before being evacuated back to the
United States, the specialists - including Peter Piot, who
co-discovered Ebola in 1976 - said Africans affected by the same
outbreak should get the same chance.
Piot, David Heymann and Jeremy Farrar, all influential infectious
disease professors and respectively directors of the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Chatham House Centre on Global
Health Security, and the Wellcome Trust, said there were several
antiviral drugs, monoclonal antibodies and vaccines under study for
possible use against Ebola.
"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.
"These dire circumstances call for a more robust international
response," they added.
Almost 900 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia have been killed
by Ebola and more than 1,600 infected since the virus started
spreading in Guinea in February.
Two American aid workers who fell sick with Ebola in Liberia saw their
conditions improve by varying degrees in Liberia after they received
an experimental drug called ZMapp, developed by San Diego-based
private biotech firm Mapp Biopharmaceutical.
Piot, Farrar and Heymann questioned why Africans were not being given
the same chance.
If the deadly virus was raging though wealthy countries, they said,
medical agencies "would begin discussions with companies and labs
developing these products and then make rapid decisions about which of
them might be appropriate for compassionate use".
"Experimental treatments shouldn't be rolled out generally without
prior safety testing," they said in their statement, issued in London
late on Tuesday.
"But in the face of the critical challenge in West Africa, the WHO and
Western medical agencies should be helping countries weigh the risks
and benefits of limited deployment of the best (drug and vaccine)
candidates to those in the greatest need, while continuously
monitoring safety and efficacy."
Biotech firm Mapp and its commercial partner Leaf Biopharmaceutical
said the ZMapp drug was only identified as a potential treatment
candidate in January and that, as a result, very little of it was
currently available. The company said that the treatment was hard to
produce and that it was working to scale up production as soon as
possible.
The ZMapp serum consists of three antibodies manufactured in modified
tobacco leaves, which take weeks to grow.
A spokesman for the Geneva-based WHO told Reuters news agency that the
United Nations health agency "would not recommend any drug that has
not gone through the normal process of licensing and clinical trials".
Treating patients with experimental drugs that have not been tested in
humans to determine safety and efficacy is highly unusual.
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