NEW YORK, August 8 (RIA Novosti) - Experimental new Ebola drugs are untested and should not be rolled out for use in emergencies "for several years," the Council on Foreign Relations’ (CFR) senior fellow for global health Laurie Garrett told RIA Novosti Thursday.
“There are quite a number of different Ebola experimental vaccines and drugs out there – but none of them has gone through clinical trials or been safety-tested by the standards of our Food and Drug Administration,” Garrett said. “Though some might enter such safety trials in the calendar year 2014, none would be available for widespread use and commercial production for several years.”
There is no licensed treatment or vaccine for the Ebola virus. Medics use rehydration fluid and antibiotics to fight infections. Some groups have called for new drugs to be rolled out in Africa after an infected US aid worker responded positively to an experimental treatment known as Zmapp.
“One person doing well on a drug might be because they were a healthy person to begin with; it might have been sheer shake of the dice. There is no evidence the drug was why the individual was doing better. This is not sufficient that it should result in spending millions of dollars to rev up production of one specific drug,” added Garrett.
More than 930 people have died in the worst Ebola outbreak in history and the first to have occurred in West Africa. It began in southern Guinea in February and spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Some cases have also been reported in Nigeria.
