A US company that manufactures an experimental drug for treating the deadly Ebola virus on Monday disclosed that it has dispatched all its available supplies to West Africa.
According to a statement posted on the Mapp Bio website, “In responding to the request received this weekend from a West African nation, the available supply of ZMapp is exhausted,
“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 partnership between US and Canadian researchers involves a drug that is manufactured in tobacco leaves and is difficult to produce on a large scale. The company did not reveal which nation received the doses, or how many were sent.
An estimated 961 people have died from the hemorrhagic fever in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria since March during the largest Ebola outbreak in history. CNN reported that Liberia is expected to receive the sample doses.
The two American missionary workers who took ill with Ebola while working in Monrovia last month were given doses of the drug.
The two missionaries have been transported to an isolation unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, where they are receiving continuous care. A Spanish priest who contracted Ebola has also been given a dose.
A special meeting of the World Health Organization on Monday focused on the ethics of distributing experimental medications to some people but not others.
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly maintained that the drug’s effects were unknown, since it has not been through a process of rigorous clinical trials. It is widely believed that there is no medicine or vaccine for Ebola on the world market yet.
It will be recalled that Nigeria had earlier reached out to the United States Centre for Disease Control and Prevention to avail it the experimental vaccine for the treatment of EVD patients in Nigeria but the request was turned down with the US president Barrack Obama informing that it would be premature to share the trial drug with Africa.
Since 22 days ago when Nigeria recorded the first case of Ebola Viral Disease, there has been 10 confirmed cases of the deadly disease, with 177 persons under surveillance. However, 177 primary and secondary contacts of the index case have been placed under surveillance or isolation.
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