WHO Prepared to Treat Ebola Patients With Experimental Treatments
The World Health Organization (WHO) held an emergency meeting last week and announced they were ready to declare the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa a public health emergency. Moving forward, the WHO gathered a panel of experts to discuss the ethics of dispensing experimental treatments, which have never before been tested in humans, to patients and health workers in West Africa. Following conclusion of the panel, the WHO made the ruling that unapproved treatments can be used to treat or prevent an Ebola outbreak, providing certain conditions are met that warrant the use of experimental treatments.
According to the WHO, traditional methods of preventing the spread of Ebola are not working as quickly as they have in the past. Moves to isolate affected areas and quarantine infected people are not slowing the spread. Approximately1,800 patients are now infected and the death toll is rising to over one thousand.
Dr. Marie Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO's assistant director-general, reported to CNN that these concerns combined with the limited health care resources of affected countries, called for more extreme measures and that the panel unanimously voted to proceed with experimental treatments.
While the WHO is prepared to offer the treatments, they will not be implemented without a very specific set of conditions. These conditions include informed consent, transparency of all aspects of care, freedom of choice, and rigid guidelines to protect the confidentiality and dignity of any patients involved.
Furthermore, those health workers administering these treatments are responsible for clearly and accurately recording all data collected regarding the safety and efficacy of its use and sharing it with the rest of the world. The panel discussed a streamlined method of data collection and will continue to develop guidelines.
The two treatments receiving the most attention currently are ZMapp, manufactured by San Diego pharma company Mapp BioPharmaceuticals and the U.S.-subsidized study at Tekmira for TK-Ebola, undergoing preliminary research in Canada.
Even with WHO approval, researchers for both companies worry that current supply will not meet the demand. The FDA recently approved a shipment of ZMapp to Liberia which has exhausted the supply of the drug, and, according to CNN, more will not be available for several months.
Dr. Jesse Goodman, director of the Center on Medical Product Access, Safety and Stewardship at Georgetown, told CNN, "There are not adequate supplies of any of the investigational agents anywhere near ready for human use.”