GENEVA: World health experts met in Geneva yesterday for urgent talks on fast-tracking experimental 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. “Everybody keeps asking why isn’t this medication made available to our people out there?” Samuel A S Kargbo from Sierra Leone’s ministry of health told AFP.
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.
“Our doctors who have been treating patients are also dying, and it’s not made available,” Kargbo said. “Everywhere people are asking: ‘When is it going to be made available?’ The question is ‘When?’ because people think it should be now.”
The meeting to discuss the merits of eight experimental treatments and two vaccines comes as the WHO warned that the death toll in the epidemic, which is centred on Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, was still rising fast.
“The current west African Ebola outbreak is unprecedented in size, complexity and the strain it has imposed on health systems,” WHO said in a statement, acknowledging the “intense” public demand for a treatment.
Abdulsalami Nasidi, project director at the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, said that the Geneva meeting’s discussion of new drugs “gives a lot of hope to the African people affected and those who are in panic”.
AFP
