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Anti-Ebola Drug ZMapp Makes Clean Sweep: 18 of 18 Monkeys Survive Infection
Scientific American reports, based on a study published today in Nature, that ZMapp, the drug that has been used to treat seven patients during the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa, can completely protect monkeys against the virus, research has found. ... The drug — a cocktail of three purified immune proteins, or monoclonal antibodies, that target the Ebola virus — has been given to seven people: two US and three African health-care workers, a British nurse and a Spanish priest. The priest and a Liberian health-care worker who got the drug have since died. There is no way to tell whether ZMapp has been effective in the patients who survived, because they received the drug at different times during the course of their disease and received various levels of medical care.
NPR also has an interview with study lead Gary Kobinger, who says that (very cautious) human trials are in the works, and emphasizes the difficulites of producing the drug in quantity.
By law in the U.S. (and most other countries), as well as health care and research codes of ethics, study participants must voluntarily provide informed consent to receive experimental treatments. It's extremely difficult to prove the voluntary part for at-risk populations including people who are elderly, poor, or undereducated. Studies of these populations require additional oversight and safeguards.
Source: I'm qualified to perform research with participants who have linguistic or cognitive impairments and did so during my M.S. program and in my first job after graduation.
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontiéres (MSF)
http://www.doctorswithoutborde...
In any case, so far, the only people infected in Nigeria are the health care professionals that treated a Liberian who arrived infected, and the families of those health care workers.
Disclaimer: two of the deceased (a doctor and a nurse) were known to a colleague of my partner.
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Yeah, they're the first NGO that started fighting this outbreak, and have the biggest presence in the area. Which is not a surprise given that they're one of very few (possibly even the only one) equipped to deal with biosafety level 4 diseases in the wild. With only a little bit of hyperbole, one could say they moved in where a lot of other NGOs moved out (and rightly so).
That said, all their qualified personnel and relevant equipment is already invested into this outbreak, so a significant part of any money you donate to them right now will go to their other programs - mainly Syria at the moment. However, don't let that stop you. Apart from Syria obviously needing some attention too, MSF is pretty efficient in the way thy use their money and their approach is uncompromisingly impartial and science-driven, to the point of being shunned by deep religious conservatives (*gasp*, promoting the use of condoms) and people with political agendas (*gasp*, daring to criticize the dire humanitarian circumstances in Palestine). Which explains why they're relatively unpopular in the USA compared to the rest of the western world.