doctor in rural Liberia inundated with Ebola patients says
he's had good results with a treatment he tried out of sheer
desperation: an HIV drug.
CNN reports that Dr. Gobee Logan had given the drug,
lamivudine, to 15 Ebola patients, and all but two survived.
That's a 7% mortality rate. Across West Africa, the virus
has killed 70% of its victims.
Outside Logan's Ebola center in Tubmanburg, four of his
recovering patients walk the grounds, always staying inside
the fence that separates the Ebola patients from everyone
else.
"My stomach was hurting; I was feeling weak; I was
vomiting," Elizabeth Kundu, 23, says of her
bout with the virus. "They gave me medicine, and I'm
feeling fine. We take it, and we can eat -- we're feeling fine
in our bodies."
Kundu and the other 12 patients who took the lamivudine
and survived, received the drug in the first five days or so
of their illness. The two patients who died received it
between days five and eight.
"I'm sure that when [patients] present early, this
medicine can help," Logan said. "I've proven it right in
my center."
Logan is mindful that lamivudine can cause liver and other
problems, but he says it's worth the risk since Ebola is so
deadly. He also knows American researchers will say only
a real study can prove effectiveness. That would involve
taking a much larger patient population and giving half of
them lamivudine and the other half a placebo.
"Our people are dying and you're taking about
studies?" he said. "It's a matter of doing all that I can
do as a doctor to save some people's lives."
Logan said he got the idea to try lamivudine when he read
in scientific journals that HIV and Ebola replicate inside the
body in much the same way.
"Ebola is a brainchild of HIV," he said. "It's a
destructive strain of HIV."
At first he tried an HIV drug called acyclovir, but it didn't
seem to be effective. Then he tried lamivudine on a
healthcare worker who'd become ill, and within a day or
two he showed signs of improvement and survived. Dr.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases says that theoretically, Logan's
approach has some merit. Lamivudine is a nucleocide
analog, and other drugs in this class are being studied to
treat Ebola.
http://oshokay..in/2014/09/doctor-cures-ebola-successfully-with.html