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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.
•Lagos
State Governor, Mr. Babatunde Fashola SAN (middle), his Ekiti, Ondo,
and Ogun States counterparts, Dr. Kayode Fayemi (left), Dr. Olusegun
Mimiko (2nd left) and Senator Ibikunle Amosun (2nd right) respectively
and the Deputy Governor of Oyo State, Mr. Moses Alake Adeyemo (right)
during the South West Governor’s Press Conference on the Ebola Virus
Disease which followed a containment strategy meeting of the Governors
at the Lagos House, Ikeja, on Wednesday.
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 and they are 24 hours or 72 hours from death,”
said Geisbert. “The damage has been done.”
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