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NEW TREATMENTS FOR Ebola need to be fast-tracked, say leading health experts.
In a letter to The Lancet journal, 17 senior health professionals and medical ethicists, from Africa, Europe, and USA, argue that randomised controlled trials are unethical and impractical.
Alternative treatments
They said the lack of effective treatment options for Ebola, high mortality with the current standard of care, and the paucity of effective health care systems in the affected regions means that alternative trial designs need to be considered.
Some US and British airports have begun screening passengers arriving from West African countries for Ebola, however, Ireland has ruled out any such measures, with the Minister for Health Leo Varadkar stating that it is far more effective to screen people as they leave countries where the virus is present, rather than screening people coming into a country.
The medical experts who wrote the letter stated:
No-one insisted that western medical workers offered zMapp and other investigational products were randomised to receive the drug or conventional care plus a placebo.None of us would consent to be randomised in such circumstances.In cancers with a poor prognosis for which there are no good treatments, evidence from studies without a control group can be accepted as sufficient for deployment, and even for licensing by regulators, with fuller analysis following later.
There is no need for rules to be bent or corners to be cut: the necessary procedures already exist, and are used.
Epidemic
While they said they accepted that randomised controlled trials can generate strong evidence in ordinary circumstances, they do not agree that “in the midst of the worst Ebola epidemic in history” that they work in this case.
They said there is an urgent need is to establish whether new investigational drugs offer survival benefits, and which, if any, should be recommended by the World Health Organisation.
“We have innovative but proven trial designs for doing exactly that. We should be using them, rather than doggedly insisting on gold standards that were developed for different settings and purposes,” the concluded.
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Looks more link a hand gun in the main pic!
Tough but fair.
It looks like someone decided that culling would be a good way to stop the spread of the disease….
Or an RFID micrichip implant scanner.
i think thats the subtle point of this picture, to condition people. how many thousands die as a result of the flu as a factor in this state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZonCVRQ-2s
http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/health-pharma/gsk-hit-with-380m-corruption-fine-in-china-1.1935191
gsk are involved in making the vaccine. the real danger is in the vaccine, look at how many lawsuits their are in relation to flu vaccines here. now they want to release an untested shot for ebola and are raping up the fear to do it.
With only 3/10 surviving, if i (God forbid) had Ebola, i would want them to test WHATEVER on me if there was a chance it could save me.
i know Ryan Carroll will be here in a minute talking about the validity of the trials and whether you would ‘have fought it off yourself’. i actually wouldnt give a shit about testing the robust-ness of my immune system and its survival capacities. i would just want to live.
i think they should offer anyone out in the three countries affected access to drugs which show promise. i think its so cruel not to, offering the line of ‘using clean research methods’ as an excuse.
If the aim is to develop a cure or a vaccine, which it is, then valid trials and clean research methods are required otherwise it’s near pointless. The purpose of testing various drugs on people isn’t to try curing individuals, it’s to prove that it works repeatedly and on the general population
I actually am very happy to see that what I’m gonna say on this topic is so predictable now I don’t even need to say it, because that means I have not been wasting my time and the message has at least partly got across.
I don’t spend time doing this because I wanna show off my smarts or how much I know about ebola, I do it because I see a lot of people needlessly worrying about it and I want to put their minds at ease. Science, facts and logic matter a lot to me. Nobody is totally rational all the time but I try to be
Without placebo controlled trials we can’t test a vaccine,., how will we know whos fighting it off cos of the vaccine and whos fighting it off cos they have a strong immune system (or natural immunity, 1percent of the human race is immune to HIV for example)?
If we start giving out untested highly experimental drugs to millions of people it would be a total disaster. You’re thinking of it as ”why not at least try it” and if it does not work we’ve lost nothing. But that’s not how it works, even drugs that help you can harm you. One of the cancer drugs I was on for a while can cause spontaneous ruptures in your intestines…just like that and this is a tried and tested high tech medication. We might try the drugs on someone and it might kill them, and that could have been a person who might have naturally fought them off…that’s a black ethical line we can’t cross esp with the wests history of drug experimentation on Africans. Now it can still kill the people in the trial…sure..but worst case scenario there is the people in the trial die, but if we’ve given the drugs out to millions then thousands die who might have fought it off on their own.
So only giving it to hose drugs that show promise…well we will…after trials have been done..but without those trials we don’t KNOW which drugs are showing promise and which are just peoples immune systems. 8-10 cases is not statistically significant enough data to base a decision on whats promising, it’s too small a sample.
If this goes airborne we’re all fu(ked!
If AIDS goes airborne we are all fuc*ed, if cancer goes airborne we are fuc*ed. What’s your point?
Not all of us, at least 30% of people are safe. Sure we will be pretty sick for a while but will come out the other end.
Anyhow, it doesn’t have the receptors to become airborne, so no need to panic.
My point is that cancer and AIDS have as much chance of going airborne as Ebola does, this is not a Dustin Hoffman movie.
Fast tracked = not fully tested :-o
Hiv has been around since the 19th century in the form of SIV, it’s mutated a few times, it’s never become airborne in over 100 years.
Viruses tend to become less dangerous over time not more, take the HIV example, it used to be a death sentence now it’s virtually easy to control
Make that 32,000 years for SIV
Yea great idea Leo…. lets not screen passengers coming into our Country and rely on the HOPE that other countries are doing it for us!! #f**kedupcountry
Complete nonsense I’m afraid. There is absolutely no point trying to screen for it in Ireland. The vast majority of people with a fever will have something else and the guy incubating Ebola may have no symptoms beacause it’s asymptomatic for most it’s incubation so it would be a complete waste of resource. There’s a point in exit screening in West Africa as the chance of someone having it is high. Actually the chance of someone coming back from the Haj with Middle East Respiratory Corona Virus Infection is probably more worrying.
There are no flights coming here from Africa so what would be the point? Anyone coming through here from Africa via the UK will have been screened in the UK. They can’t do blood tests on every single passenger it’s not practical because it’s a highly compelex test for ebola. As Joe says loads of people have fevers so short of them being late stage and having bleeding eyes and nose (in which case I think they’d come looking for help) we’d not spot them.
It makes sense , statistically, to do exit screening leaving the infected zones, and they are, it makes sense, statistically to do it in the UK with all their flights from Africa (600 people a day) but by the time someones got here that means they’ve already been checked TWICE. Once coming out of the African airports and once going into the UK, they’re not gonna start showing new symptoms during their flight from the UK to Ireland of what? 40 minutes?
Think about it.
@Ryan Carroll. You’re some bullsh!tter.
You can fly from Morocco to Ireland on Ryanair, ffs.
“She’s infected, shoot her in the head!!”
Danny, it is person to person transmission which causes mutuation. Medication, antivirals or antibodies of surviving victims do not cause mutations.
Viruses mutate, we all know this. They can mutate over long periods of time, or it can happen suddenly. This can happen as a reaction to a knew drug. People who have recovered from Ebola can no longer spread it, but if they’re being given drugs for it it means they haven’t recovered. That was only one of my points
I read somewhere that the virus can be spread in the semen of a man for up to seven weeks after he has recovered. Correct me if I’m wrong. If this is the case what about other bodily fluids, saliva, etc?
It makes very good sense to accelerate the deployment of drugs for Ebola even if there has not been a rigorous and best standard clinical testing.
No it doesn’t. It could make the situation worse by causing the virus to mutate, the drugs might kill even more people, and there’d be no controlled testing to show that the drugs will work on the general population
They might even prove to be highly addictive, as has happened with various medical drugs in the past
Of course, the real problem is the failure of first world countries to deply enough resources to contain and to eminate the outbreak. Early intervention was critical. We reap what we fail to sow.
This scare will be history by spring. Just like avian flu, piggy flu, cjd and all the other western scare bull
Am I missing something here? ” its more effective to screen people leaving this country !” Dont get it! Signed confused .com
They’re saying that it’s better to screen people as they leave countries currently infected
obv more effective and cheaper to simply do the screening as people leave the country where ebola is present instead of every other country in the world doing it.
Danny, it’s facetious to suggest that antiviral and antibody based medications could become addictive. They are not psychotropic and thet’t cross the brain-blood barrier. There is no mechanism for addiction.
Ah there’s the rest, it isn’t necessarily antivirus medication, much of the treatment focuses on the symptoms
Ever wonder why alot of diseases come or apparently start in Africa?? It’s a testing ground..these are man made dieases..don’t know why they allow people leave infected areas..it should be contained..ya’d swear that certain people wanted it to spread..there is no cure for this apparently..it’s a f#cked up world..
Looks like Americas FEMA concentration camps and FEMA coffins will finally be put tonuse after all these years of speculation.
Thankfully, the risk of mutation into an airborne virus is extremely remote. That said, the Ebola Zaire virus is highly infectious through the agency of bodily fluids and the problem is the large reservoir of infected persons which is increasing.
In a drastic and quickly death threatening situation in which conventional and approved medications have no established efficacy, where the mortality risk is in the region of 50% to 70% and where time is not on the side of the tragic victims, the luxury of an orthodox approach is unaffordable. Some lives have already been saved. We should deploy what we have and hope for the best. It may not work, it may cause other problems but it’s the best that can be done. I don’t see any valid analogy with cancer or other non communicable diseases which have a high success rate with proven meds.
It makes me annoyed countries are worrying now about the spread of ebloa and what to do about it now that it has .but it is there own fault it has .no one should have been allowed out of Africa just because they test ok at the time of leaving doesnt mean they wont develope it they should be quarantined untill the 21 days are up to make sure and then let them leave
If they don’t have it when they’re leaving, they aren’t going to have it later on unless someone infects them after they’ve left
have your say