WHO Approves Use of Experimental Ebola Drugs

The World Health Organisation or WHO approved Tuesday, the use of untested Ebola drugs to combat the increasing menace in the West African region.

The WHO convened an ethics panel in  Geneva Monday to debate the use of untested drugs and issued a statement saying , " In the particular circumstances of this outbreak, and provided certain conditions are met, the panel reached consensus that it is ethical to offer unproven interventions with as yet unknown efficacy and adverse effects, as potential treatment or prevention."

Two American aid workers who contacted the disease in Liberia have been given an experimental serum and are responding well. A little know pharmaceutical firm , Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc., San Diego , has developed the drug, called Zmapp.

ZMapp was also sent to  Madrid for the Spanish priest Pajares, who unfortunately succumbed to the disease. The Spanish authorities have refused to confirm if they gave him the drug.

The US Food and Drug Administration has also loosened restrictions on the experimental medicines of Ebola and allowed Tekmira Pharmaceuticals' TKM-Ebola drug to be used on Ebola patients. Tekmira, in collaboration with Boston University and the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, has already conducted tests on the drug's efficacy over non-human primates with Ebola infection in 2010.

A news report says that ZMapp has been sent to two West African countries to treat infected doctors, but the supply is now over. The company said it was working with the U.S. government to quickly increase production. "Additional resources are being brought to bear on scaling up," the company said. "The emergency use of an experimental medicine is a highly unusual situation."

British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline has said that it will start clinical testing of Ebola vaccine in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health. But it is believed that the testing is in phase one and the vaccine might take years.

There is no known cure for Ebola.  According to the latest World Health Organization figures published Wednesday, there are over 1,700 suspected and confirmed cases of Ebola in the four West African countries, and nearly a 1000  have died from the disease.

Last week the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global health emergency.