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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 Organisation (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.”
Meanwhile, the death rate so far in the world’s worst outbreak of Ebola is not as extreme as recorded in the past, but experts expect it to prove no less virulent in the end, once more victims succumb and the grim data is tallied up.
Latest figures from the World Health Organisation (WHO) record 1,603 cases of Ebola in the West African outbreak and 887 deaths, giving a death rate of just over 55 percent.
That is well below the 78.5 percent average death rate over 14 past outbreaks of the same virus, called the “Zaire strain” after the former name of the Democratic Republic of Congo where it was first detected in 1976. In some outbreaks the rate was up to 90 percent, according to WHO data.
Experts say death rates for Ebola outbreaks can rise as the disease runs its course, which is what they now expect.
“This is partly a statistical thing about collecting death events, and also partly about the maturity of the outbreak”, said Derek Gatherer, a virologist at Britain’s University of Lancaster who has been following the outbreak since it started in February.
“The nearer we get to the end of the epidemic, the closer we would expect the fatality rate to correspond to the Zaire Ebola average of 80 percent”, he said. – Reuters.
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