WASHINGTON, August 8 (RIA Novosti) - The United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is at least one year away from drugs or a vaccine to treat and prevent Ebola, according to CDC Director, Thomas Frieden, testifying on Thursday before an emergency hearing by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“Right now we are months or at least a year away, from everything I have seen and heard, from significant quantities of ... drugs or a vaccine. If everything goes well, that could change,” Frieden said.
Last week, two American health care workers were evacuated from Liberia after contracting Ebola and were given an experimental serum. Under intense medical supervision, they have shown signs of improvement.
California Representative Karen Bass asked Frieden about the course of drugs noting “a lot of concern that we have access [to a cure] and are not providing it.”
“We really don’t know. I think that really has to be emphasized,” Frieden said about the experimental course of drugs.
“Whatever happens to these two individuals...we will not know from their experience whether these drugs work,” he added. “We cannot know until it has been rigorously studied.”
Addressing the concerns that more of the drugs used to treat the two Americans exist, Frieden said, “I also cannot tell you how many courses there are. There are a handful. I have heard there are fewer than the fingers of one hand.”
As of August 4, there were 1,711 reported cases of Ebola across four West African nations with 932 deaths. That number is likely to increase as the disease just recently made its first appearance in the densely inhabited city of Lagos, Nigeria. Despite these complications, the CDC emphasizes that Ebola can be stopped. The essential considerations to stopping the outbreak is finding the disease, responding to it largely through quarantines, and preventing its spread.
