In another case of medical stupidity gone wild with a 90%+ fatality rate you would think that a medicine which is shown safe and approved for other uses would be a welcome addition to the Ebola fighting arsenal, but not so fast says WHO and Doctors Without Borders.
It seems that it is unethical human experimentation to use a safe drug which might fight Ebola but hasn’t had time to be tested, in part because this is the first Ebola outbreak since it became available.
A Toronto University researcher, Elanor Fish, PhD., has been working for a month or more to get the attention of someone with the authority to use Infergen (a synthetic form of Interferon a) in the treatment of Ebola patients.
While the ZMapp antibody cocktail treatment successfully used on the two U.S. Ebola patients in Atlanta is in critically short supply and, in fact the existing supply was used up in curing those two Americans, Dr. Fish has arranged for the donation of 60,000 vials of Infergen, all she and the Ukrainian company Pharmunion BSV Development ask is that it be used to treat Ebola patients in Africa.
Meanwhile the death toll has reached 2288 in the current outbreak.
Some of the above information comes from the August 15 issue of Science, the magazine of the AAAS.
