WASHINGTON, Stella Igwe-Adesoga—Officials of the United States government Friday morning denied reports that it declined requests from the Nigerian government to provide a serum that can cure Ebola to desperate victims in Nigeria and several African nations where close to 1,000 people have died of the virus.
According to a top official of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (CDC) ” the U.S doesn’t have such a serum”.
“What the U.S. does have are a number of possible treatments for Ebola that are in the experimental stages. Most were developed with the help of federal financing after 9/11; drug companies previously had little financial incentive to develop drugs for an illness that affected relatively few people, all of them in developing countries. But after the 2001 attacks, the government became interested in staving off possible bioterrorism”.
“Some of the treatments look very promising after early trials on animals. But it is not yet known whether any of them will cure or prevent the illness in humans, or even whether they are safe for humans to take. Nor is it known which among them would prove the most helpful”.
Per Second News gathered that the experimental treatment that two American aid workers were given after being stricken with Ebola in Liberia was ZMapp, a cocktail of three monoclonal antibodies. Both patients, who are being cared for at Emory University Hospital, are improving, an outcome that has governments in Nigeria and other affected African countries as well as three highly regarded Ebola experts clamoring to have the serum released to the hundreds of people who are infected in West Africa.
The official said that the name of the drug is “ZMapp”, he said that the main reason for holding off on ZMapp’s release — that it isn’t known whether the drug will help or even whether it might harm the very people it is intended to save, and that safety trials must be completed before it is widely distributed.
There are other promising Ebola treatments that are in Phase I safety trials; ZMapp hasn’t reached that stage yet. It might make more sense, public health experts say, to make available the medications that are at least part of the way through safety testing.