The Ebola epidemic in West Africa forces the World Health Organisation to take unusual steps. Since there is no licensed treatment against the disease to date, it is planned to explore the use of unlicensed drugs, announced the organisation headquartered in Geneva (Switzerland).
In the next days, medical ethicists will convene for consultations. The meetings will focus on the drug ZMapp, which, to date, has only been tested in monkeys, but not in clinical trials with humans. Two Ebola patients in the USA have already been treated with the medication, but whether or not their improvement can be attributed to the drug and if there are long-term side effects remains unclear. "We need to ask the medical ethicists to give us guidance on what the responsible thing to do is," said WHO Director General Marie-Paule Kieny. In case of approval, and given the limed amount of the drug, the question arises as to who should receive it.
However, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of a diagnostic test developed by the Department of Defence to assess the risk of infections. The DoD EZ1 Real-time RT-PCR Assay may help curb the highly contagious virus. The time interval from infection to onset of symptoms can, in fact, take up to 21 days.
Up to 04 August, 1,711 people were infected with Ebola and 932 died, according to figures published by the WHO. Since the beginning of the year, the disease has spread from Guinea to West Africa. This epidemic is the worst outbreak of Ebola since the disease was discovered in 1976. The current strain has a mortality rate of about 55 percent.
