Following the death of two victims of Ebola Virus Disease,
EVD, in Lagos, western Nigeria, the state government has ordered churches and
Muslim prayer groups in the state to suspend all crusades and other programmes
that will attract large gatherings to avoid spread of the disease.
At a news conference in Lagos on Wednesday, Lagos
Commissioner for Health, Dr. Jide Idris said the government had already written
to churches and mosques to stop holding crusades and other big programmes that
would attract large crowds.
According to him, large gathering should be avoided at this
period until further notice, while religious groups in different parts of the
state should put on hold any crusade, congress or convention in the meantime.
He also said more volunteers were urgently needed to join
the crusade to defeat Ebola as the situation is extremely dire.
“More volunteers are needed urgently, especially contact
trackers, case management personnel, especially those with experience and
expertise in infectious disease control, such as doctors, nurses, environmental
health workers and so on,” he said.
Idris assured that government would
guarantee the safety of doctors and others that would volunteer and would give
them life insurance cover.
The commissioner also disclosed that
two of the patients with EVD were in critical condition at the Isolation centre
where they were being treated, resulting in the need for more intensive health
attention and care to save their lives.
Idris added that 27 new contacts
that had primary contact with those the eight people who had primary contact
with Patrick Sawyer, the deceased Liberian, had been established and that more
contacts were still being sought for.
“Based on contact tracing arising
from the index case that came into the country from Liberia, a total of 70
persons were monitored. Of these, eight have been admitted and their blood
samples taken.
“Results of five out of the eight
blood samples taken have been received with four testing positive while the
fifth person was negative. Results of three samples are outstanding.
Regrettably, one of the eight admitted died at 2:06 p.m., thus bringing deaths
recorded on account of the virus outbreak to two.”
Idris appealed to businessmen and
women engaged in sale of materials and equipment needed for the management of
Ebola not to cash in on this unfortunate situation to hike their prices.
He called for vigilance as human
beings could only contract the disease through physical contact with a person
who is acutely and gravely ill from Ebola virus through body fluid, such as
blood, urine, stool, saliva, breast milk, among others.
Meanwhile, with hundreds of patients
in Africa suffering the devastating effects of Ebola, health experts are
scrambling to determine which drugs might offer the best experimental
treatment, and researchers are being pressed by government officials to speed
up their work, reports Reuters.
Three treatments have shown
especially promising results in monkeys, the researchers said. One, produced by
tiny California biotech Mapp Biopharmaceutical, gained international prominence
this week when it was given to two U.S. aid workers who contracted Ebola in
West Africa and have since shown signs of improvement.
Others are from Vancouver-based
Tekmira Pharmaceuticals and privately-held Profectus BioSciences, of Tarrytown,
NY.
On Wednesday the World Health
Organization said it would discuss next week the ethics of using Ebola drugs
that have never been cleared for human use, wary of a long history of medicines
being tested on people who were never properly informed of the risks. In the
countries hardest hit by Ebola, suspicion of foreign medical workers is already
widespread.
But the health minister of Nigeria,
Onyenbuchi Chukwu, told reporters this week that he had asked U.S. health
officials about access to experimental Ebola therapies. U.S. drugmakers are
fielding questions from government officials about their ability to supply
treatments in sufficient quantities should the request come.
“For years we’ve told the government
you need to invest a little bit of money in this,” said Profectus chief
scientific officer John Eldridge. “And now it’s, ‘Oh my God, how fast can you
make this?’”
Officials at Mapp and Tekmira would
not comment on efforts to make their treatments available in response to the
outbreak.
Speaking at a news conference on
Wednesday, President Barack Obama said he lacks enough information to
green-light Mapp’s drug to treat the deadly Ebola virus and that the initial
response should focus on public health measures to contain the outbreak.
“We’ve got to let the science guide
us, and I don’t think all the information is in on whether this drug is
helpful,” the president said, adding that public health officials, in the
course of containing the current outbreak, could assess whether new drugs or
treatments can be effective.
“We’re focusing on the public health
approach right now, but I will continue to seek information about what we’re
learning about these drugs going forward,” he said.
Dr. James Crowe, director of the
Vaccine Center at Vanderbilt University who has been developing an Ebola
treatment similar to Mapp’s, said a Pentagon agency contacted him this week
about his work and added he will meet next week with government scientists
about accelerating his research.
No Ebola drugs or vaccines have even
entered mid-stage human trials, let alone been approved. The furthest along
have been tested only in monkeys and a handful of humans.
Mapp Biopharmaceutical began
developing its ZMapp treatment more than a decade ago. It consists of a
cocktail of monoclonal antibodies, proteins that are highly specific for the
Ebola virus and that are produced in bioengineered tobacco plants.
In 2012 Mapp, working with
scientists at the U.S. Army Military Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
(USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland, announced that when rhesus macaques
received the cocktail an hour after infection by Ebola, all survived. When they
received it 48 hours after infection, two-thirds survived.
Last year, ZMapp passed a stiffer
test: monkeys that had been infected with Ebola and developed fevers and other
symptoms received the intravenous cocktail 104 to 120 hours after infection; 43
percent recovered.
When the U.S. government decided to
develop a contingency plan in case of accidental exposure to Ebola by one or
two people at a U.S. research facility, it began storing a small amount of
ZMapp, according to a source familiar with the contingency plan. ZMapp was
chosen because the science is relatively easy to understand and the risks
considered relatively small, the source said.
The stock of Tekmira soared on
expectations its Ebola drug might speed toward approval due to the crisis, or
even be used in the current outbreak.
Under a $140 million contract with
the U.S. Department of Defense, it is developing a drug based on a genetic
technology called RNA interference. The idea is to take strands of genetic
material that are the virus’s mirror image and, using nanoparticles, slip them
into cells where Ebola is replicating. In theory, the RNA disables the virus.
In experiments by scientists at the
army research unit, Tekmira reported last November, most animals infected with
lethal amounts of Ebola survived when given the RNA product. The survival rate
was 83 percent when the animals were treated 24 or 48 hours after infection and
67 percent when they were treated 72 hours after.
“It is amazing how well that works
in non-human primates,” said Ebola researcher Thomas Geisbert of the University
of Texas Medical Branch, who has conducted several studies of the company’s
drug in monkeys.
Last month, Tekmira announced that
its early-stage human trial had been put on hold by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, which had concerns about the drug’s safety. Tekmira declined
requests for an interview.
Profectus BioSciences has also
tested its Ebola vaccine in monkeys, with good results, said Eldridge.
In a study with scientists at
government biomedical research centers and the Pentagon, Profectus found that a
single intramuscular injection protected all of the rhesus monkeys exposed to
Ebola three weeks later. The company hopes to launch a human trial to assess
the vaccine’s safety within the next 12 months, Eldridge said.
An experimental vaccine similar to
Profectus’s, developed by academic and government scientists, was rushed into
emergency use only once. In 2009 a scientist in Germany working with
Ebola-infected guinea pigs pricked her finger with a syringe containing the
virus. The vaccine was flown from Canada, one of the sites where it was being
developed.
“She got that vaccine in less than
40 hours and survived,” said Geisbert, though it’s impossible to know whether
that was because of the vaccine. “She lived. That’s all I care about.”
With greater financial support,
scientists said, Ebola treatments could be ready for use sooner. For less than
$10 million, said Vanderbilt’s Crowe, four or five of the experimental drugs
could be ready for testing within in four months.
All of them seem to be effective
only in a small window after exposure, however.
“Nothing on planet Earth is going to
work if somebody comes in with full-blown Ebola hemorrhagic fever a
and they are
24 hours or 72 hours from death,” said Geisbert. “The damage has been done.”
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