World experts race to deploy experimental Ebola drugs

Aorld health experts will meet in Geneva on Friday for the second day of urgent talks on fast-tracking experimental Ebola drugs as doctors in the worst-hit countries pleaded to be given the serums. With no fully tested treatments for Ebola, the World Health Organization has endorsed potential cures like ZMapp to be rushed out. The more than 200 experts assembled by the World Health Organisation are looking at issues of safety and effectiveness, and considering which treatments should be prioritized for testing during the current outbreak. ZMapp has been given to about 10 health workers who contracted the virus, including Americans and Europeans, three of whom recovered. Its stocks have been exhausted, but WHO said a few hundred doses could potentially be ready by the end of the year.

Everybody keeps asking why isn’t this medication made available to our people out there?

Samuel Kargbo, from Sierra Leone’s ministry of health, told AFP

There are about a half dozen medicines and vaccines in development. “None are clinically proven,” WHO stressed in a working document for the meeting, adding that “while extraordinary measures are now in place to accelerate the pace of clinical trials, new treatments or vaccines are not expected for widespread use before the end of 2014”. The agency warned that the death toll in the epidemic, which is centred on Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, was still growing fast. WHO on Thursday however put the official death toll a bit lower, at 1,841, out of a total of 3,685 cases in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Meanwhile, the American aid agency announced Thursday it would donate $75 million to fund 1,000 more beds in Ebola treatment centers in Liberia and buy 130,000 more protective suits for health care workers.

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