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| Professor John Ashton, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health |
Western
countries should tackle drugs firms’ “scandalous” reluctance to invest in
research into the virus which has already killed over 700 people in West
Africa, the UK’s top public doctor said, adding, “They’d find a cure if Ebola
came to London.” Independent reports.
The
pharmaceutical industry are reluctant to invest in research to produce
treatments and vaccines “because
the numbers involved are, in their terms, so small and don't justify the
investment,” said Professor John Ashton, president of the UK
Faculty of Public Health, an independent body for specialists in public health
in the United Kingdom.
“This
is the moral bankruptcy of capitalism acting in the absence of an ethical and
social framework,” he wrote in The Independent on Sunday.
“Ebola
has finally made it on to the front pages,” he said, adding
that it may be because “we are
in the ‘silly season,’” or because “there is now the threat of cases other than of
poverty-stricken Africans.”
Ashton compared the
international response to Ebola to the initial one toward AIDS “which emerged, probably from West Africa, at
the same time [with Ebola].” He added that the lack of experience
of dealing with the deadly virus means that “the
pattern of spread is initially unclear.”
RT
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