•US tells Nigeria region would have to wait months for supplies because such small quantities exist, says health minister.



West African patients infected with the Ebola virus will not have access to experimental drugs being used to treat American cases of the disease for several months, if at all, Nigerian health authorities said on Thursday.
Health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu told a press conference he had asked the US health authorities about the unproven medicines used on two American
doctors, but was told such small quantities existed that west Africa would have to wait for months for supplies, even if they were proved safe and effective.

Dr Kent Brantly and Dr Nancy Writebol of the evangelical Christian organisation Samantha's Purse contracted the virus while helping to treat victims in
Liberia. They were given the drug ZMapp after being evacuated to the US, and appear to be recovering.

A spokesman for the US Centres for Disease Control said "there are virtually no doses available" and they would take several months to manufacture.
Even if supplies do become available, medical ethicists are divided over whether they should be used in the current Ebola outbreak in west Africa .

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has called a meeting of experts next week to help it guide doctors and drug companies who may consider shipping
experimental drugs to the four countries hit by the disease.

"We are in an unusual situation in this outbreak. We have a disease with a high fatality rate, without any proven treatment or vaccine," said Dr Marie-Paule Kieny, assistant director general at the WHO. "We need to ask the medical ethicists to give us guidance on
what the responsible thing to do is."

Prof Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, welcomed the meeting, saying there were critical ethical questions to consider.

He called for the rapid establishment of "rigorous protocols for the study of experimental interventions", so that African countries could have the same opportunities to consider them as western ones and to ensure there would be equitable access to any treatment that worked.

Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at Nottingham University, said there were many questions.

"Giving unlicensed and untested (at least in humans) treatments and vaccines is a very thorny ethical issue," he said. "The infected US healthcare
workers are receiving a type of treatment (antibodies that specifically target the virus) that has a reasonably
long safety track record, so it isn't surprising – given the high fatality rate in the current outbreak – that they are happy to receive the therapy.

"But not all drugs are safe – that's why we have very stringent clinical trials. One could argue that the current outbreak provides a perfect arena in which to test new drugs, but that isn't
without risk. We don't know their safety, we don't know if they are likely to work – sure, they have been tested in animals, but these studies don't always tell us what will happen in humans."

Some of the new treatments have notbeen tried with human at all, said Prof Tom Solomon, director of the NIHR health protection research unit in emerging and zoonotic infections. It is usual for drugs to be tried in healthy volunteers first, in case of side-effects.
"The difference here is the desire for this 'first in man' experiment to be for a patient with the disease," he said.

"What is key is that if these new experimental drugs are going to be used, then this should only be done in
the context of a clinical trial. Otherwise the worry is that we will have tried these drugs, including putting people through the potential risk of experimental treatments, and still be none the wiser about which are
effective."


Read More - www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/07/ebola-patients-west-africa-denied-experimental-drugs-us-nigeria

Chaaaaaai

I guess this means that we now have to look inwards for the cure. Call me supersticious but I believe that every sickness known to every environment or region has its cured tucked away within it waiting for its discovery.
...Meanwhile,what has Prof Maurice Iwu and his team got for us so far? Any development?