PRESIDENT GOODLUCK JONATHAN WATCHES
GOVERNOR BABATUNDE FASHOLA OF LAGOS STATE AS HE SANITIZES HIS HANDS
BEFORE THE COMMENCEMENT OF A MEETING ON EBOLA VIRUS AT THE STATE HOUSE
IN ABUJA ON 13 AUGUST 2014
An experimental drug for treatment of Ebola has been provided by a Nigerian in diaspora and will arrive the country today, Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu, has said.
Also, he said a nurse who was under observation in Lagos but fled to Enugu has been brought back to Lagos.


Online news portal, TheCable, reports that the drug, called “Nanosilver”, can now be used following the approval by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that experimental treatments are ethical in the case of the Ebola pandemic.
The Nigerian government authorised the use of experimental drugs on Wednesday. The US sent ZMapp, another experimental drug, to Liberia on Wednesday, while Canada has decided to donate 1,000 vaccines to the affected countries.
According to Chukwu, the experimental drug is a donation from a Nigerian scientist who was concerned about the threat of Ebola in his home country. “The drug will reach Nigeria today,” he said.
Chukwu disclosed that the 169 secondary contacts were still under surveillance, while in all 11 Ebola cases had been recorded, including the index case, Patrick Sawyer, and the two Nigerians who died of the disease.
“Some of the people under surveillance have completed the 21 days incubation period, and we have to let them go,” he said.
The minister said the nurse, who is a primary contact, who had travelled to Enugu had not developed the symptoms as of the time of her trip, dispelling fears that she might have infected other people.
“In Enugu yesterday, there were 21 secondary contacts with the nurse, but after investigations, there are only six secondary contacts now,” he stated.
“The nurse who is newly-wedded had no symptoms of the disease when she travelled to Enugu, and while coming back to Lagos she travelled in a special ambulance with her husband. Her husband is under quarantine now.”
Chukwu maintained that only Lagos state has recorded Ebola cases.

Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, Minister of Health
Meanwhile, the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA, has made a clarion to all Nigerian doctors to get actively involved in the control battle and provide all the needed professional expertise to ensure the situation is brought under control as quickly as possible.
The call was contained in an advertorial placed in a national newspaper published Thursday.
The statement signed by Dr. Kayode Obembe and Dr. Adewunmi Alayaki, President and Secretary General of the NMA respectively, partly reads: “All State Branch Officers’ Committees are directly to immediately liaise with the respective Commissioners for Health, Information, Housing and Urban development, Environment and Water Resources, Education, as well as Directors of medical services and Directors of public health with a view to fashioning out effective strategies to prevent the spread of Ebola virus.”
The NMA also urged the government at all levels to ensure that all the necessary Personal Protective Equipment, PPE, are made available to doctors and other healthcare workers to reduce the casualities and mitigate the risks these humanitarian service providers face.
The NMA further directed State Chairmen to set up Ebola control committees that will collaborate with State Ministries of Health, International Governmental and Non-Governmental Organisations, NGOs, and volunteer teams to actualise the goal of combating the Ebola scourge.
In the same vein the NMA has appointed Prof. Michael C. Asuzu, President, Public Health Physicians of Nigeria, Department of Community Medicine, University College Hospital, Ibadan, Oyo State, western Nigeria as the National coordinator of the Ebola Control Committee. A quarantine team for Ebola
The world’s worst outbreak of Ebola has claimed the lives of 1,069 people and there are 1,975 probable and suspected cases, the vast majority in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to new figures from the World Health Organisation.
Three people have died in Nigeria just as a consignment of experimental Ebola drugs arrived by plane in Liberia on Wednesday to treat two doctors suffering from the virus ravaging four West African countries.
The drug, ZMapp, arrived in two boxes on a commercial flight from the United States carried by Liberia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Augustine Ngafuan, and was unloaded at the VIP terminal, a Reuters witness said.
It will be taken to a hospital in the capital and administered to Liberian doctors Zukunis Ireland and Abraham Borbor, who officials said contracted the disease while attending to patients, including a late colleague.
The World Health Organisation said only around 10 to 12 doses of the drug have been made and this raises difficult ethical questions about who should get priority access.
The doctors will be the first Africans to receive it, though it has been given to a Spanish priest who later died and two U.S. aid workers who are reported to have shown signs of recovery.
Authorities are also concerned that ZMapp’s unproven status could leave them open to the charge that humans are being used as guinea pigs.
“This is not the panacea to the problem. It is at the risk of the patient,” Liberia’s Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah told journalists at Monrovia’s main airport.
Information Minister Lewis Brown told Reuters the drug merely offered a “glimmer of hope” and its use was little more than a gamble.
Even so, the clamour for it is strong given that the contagious haemorrhagic disease is killing more than half of its victims and there is no known cure or vaccine.
“I welcome it. It is very good. Our nurses are dying. If you bring them the medication it will make them stronger to fight Ebola,” said stationery seller James Liburd, in Monrovia.
In evidence of the ethical dilemma, Melvin Korkor, the first Liberian doctor to survive Ebola, said he would not have used ZMapp when he was fighting for his life because U.S. authorities said they were not responsible for any adverse effects.
“Any drug that has not been approved by FDA should not be administered,” he told Reuters.
One of the epidemic’s most tragic consequences is the toll on health care workers who rushed in as first responders only to become infected themselves due to inadequate protection measures or diagnoses of patients that came too late or were inaccurate.
The World Health Organization said this week that 170 health care workers had been infected and at least 81 had died.
Sierra Leonean doctor Modupeh Cole became the latest medical practitioner to die of Ebola, a health ministry spokesman said on Tuesday.
He contracted the disease after treating a patient who later proved to have the virus and died. The country’s leading Ebola doctor, Shek Umar Khan, also died last month.
Eight Chinese health workers are in quarantine in Sierra Leone because they may have contracted Ebola, according to the spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Freetown, Xu Zhou.
The seven doctors and one nurse treated patients at two Chinese-run hospitals in Freetown who later died from Ebola. One of the doctors has emerged from quarantine after a 21-day observation period, Zhou told Reuters.
Despite the stir caused by ZMapp, preventive public health measures will be crucial to containing the outbreak, according to the U.N. health agency. As a result, West African and other governments, including some which have seen no cases of the virus, have taken measures intended to prevent the spread of the disease.
Guinea-Bissau has decided to close its frontier with eastern neighbour Guinea, Prime Minister Domingos Simoes Pereira told a news conference. Germany on Wednesday urged its nationals to leave Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, though the request did not apply to medical workers or German diplomatic staff, a foreign ministry spokesman said.
The outbreak has brought fresh attention to efforts to find a cure. Scientists in the United States studying Ebola say they have found how it blocks and disables the body’s ability to battle infections in a discovery that should help the search for potential cures and vaccines.
The scientists found that Ebola carries a protein called VP24 that interferes with a molecule called interferon, which is vital to the immune response.
“One of the key reasons that Ebola virus is so deadly is because it disrupts the body’s immune response to the infection,” said Chris Basler of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, who worked on the study.

source: http://www.ralphcrown.com/2014/08/ebola-drug-arrives-nigeria-today.html

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