Via CityNews.ca, a report by Helen Branswell of The Canadian Press: Ebola outbreak not right for testing experimental vaccines, drugs: experts. Excerpt from a long, informative article:
The largest Ebola outbreak in history is defying the containment efforts of affected countries and international response teams, leading to calls from some quarters to use experimental drugs or vaccines to try to stop the deadly virus.
But a number of experts — including the scientist who led the work on a Canadian-made Ebola vaccine — say deploying untested tools in the current West African outbreak could be disastrous.
They say taking such a risky gamble could further erode local trust in the response teams, undermine their efforts and even endanger them. And if anyone were to have a bad reaction to one of the experimental therapies, it could jeopardize years of expensive and painstaking work spent developing tools with which to fight Ebola and its cousin, the Marburg virus.
“I get emails basically every second day from someone either asking ‘Is there something that you’re planning?’ or ‘Shouldn’t you?’ And I know I’m not the only one getting those emails,” says Dr. Heinz Feldmann, an Ebola expert who heads the laboratory of virology at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont.
While most of these discussions are happening within scientific circles, the director of Britain’s Wellcome Trust recently aired the issue publicly. Dr. Jeremy Farrar, an infectious diseases expert, has questioned why the therapies that are furthest along in the developmental pipeline aren’t being used. He suggests if this outbreak were occurring in the developed world, there would be no debate.
“Imagine if you take a region of Canada, America, Europe and you had 450 people dying of a viral hemorrhagic fever. It would just be unacceptable — and it’s unacceptable in West Africa,” Farrar says.
He notes the Canadian-made Ebola vaccine — a project Feldmann led a decade ago when he worked at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg — was released under emergency use provisions in 2009 when a German researcher pricked herself with a needle containing Ebola virus. She survived, but it was never clear if it was because of the vaccine or because she was not infected.
“We moved heaven and earth to help a German lab technician. Why is it different because this is West Africa?” Farrar asks.