A US company
that makes an experimental drug for treating the often deadly Ebola virus said
Monday it has sent all its available supplies to West Africa.
Some 961 people have died
from the hemorrhagic fever in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria since
March during the largest Ebola outbreak in history.
“In responding to the
request received this weekend from a West African nation, the available supply
of ZMapp is exhausted,” said a statement on the Mapp Bio website.
“Any decision to use ZMapp
must be made by the patients’ medical team,” it said, adding that the drug was
“provided at no cost in all cases.”
The biomedical collaboration
between Canadian researchers and US involves a drug that is manufactured in
tobacco leaves and is hard to produce on a large scale.
The company did not reveal
which nation received the doses, or how many were sent.
CNN reported that Liberia
was to receive the sample doses.
The two American missionary
workers who fell ill with Ebola while working in Monrovia last month were given
doses of the drug.
Both have been transported
to an isolation unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, where
they are receiving continuous care.
A Spanish priest who fell
sick with Ebola has also been given a dose.
The ethics of distributing
experimental medications to some people but not others was the focus of a
special meeting of the World Health Organization on Monday.
The US Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention has repeatedly stressed that the drug’s effects are
unknown, since it has not been through a process of rigorous clinical trials.
There is no medicine or
vaccine for Ebola on the world market.(AP)
- See more at:
http://aitonline.tv
Comments