First Ebola Treatment Trials To Start In West Africa; Mali Quarantines 90 Over Ebola

A doctor holds a syringe containing the Ebola vaccine called ChAd3 during medical trials at the CHUV hospital in Lausanne, on November 4, 2014 ©Richard Juilliart (AFP)

Global aid agency Doctors Without Borders said on Thursday it would begin unprecedented trials within a month on Ebola drugs and blood from survivors using patients in West Africa.

AFP reports the trials in Guinea are aimed at rushing out an emergency therapy to battle an epidemic which has taken more than 5,000 lives since December.

"This is an unprecedented international partnership which represents hope for patients to finally get a real treatment against a disease that today kills between 50 and 80 percent of those infected," said Annick Antierens, who is coordinating the trials for the medical charity, known by its French initials MSF.

The first trials are due to start in December and results could be available by February next year, MSF said.

Ebola, transmitted through bodily fluids, leads to haemorrhagic fever and -- in an estimated 70 percent of cases in the current outbreak -- death.

There is no specific treatment regime and, as yet, no licensed vaccine -- although one of the leading candidates, known as ChAd3 and made by Britain's GlaxoSmithKline, is being tested in Mali and elsewhere.

Patients' best chance of survival, if their condition is caught early enough, is taking paracetamol for their fever, rehydrating and being kept well nourished.

The French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) will trial antiviral drug favipiravir in Gueckedou, southern Guinea.
Meanwhile the death of a nurse in Mali from Ebola prompted the quarantine on Wednesday of more than 90 people in the West African country’s capital Bamako, as the World Health Organization said the disease had now claimed at least 5,160 lives.

The worst outbreak of the virus on record has ravaged the impoverished West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea and led to a global watch for cases outside the region.

Mali must now trace other people who had contact with the 25-year-old nurse and three others infected, just as an initial group of people linked to its first case completed their 21-day quarantine on Tuesday. Ebola’s maximum incubation period is 21 days.

The more than 90 quarantined in Bamako included about 20 United Nations peacekeepers being treated at the capital’s Pasteur Clinic, where the nurse worked, officials said. Police locked down the clinic on Tuesday night.

In Sierra Leone, more than 400 health workers at one of its few Ebola treatment centers went on strike over unpaid risk allowances, officials said. Some returned later in the day.

Echoing that walkout were protests and strikes by nurses across the United States over what they characterized as insufficient protection for health workers dealing with potential Ebola patients. Two nurses, who treated a Liberian man who died of the disease at a Dallas hospital in October, contracted the virus but recovered.

The Ebola virus has claimed more than 5,000 lives

California-based National Nurses United had expected about 100,000 nurses nationwide to participate in the protest, but officials from the union could not say how many people participated.

In Washington, the Obama administration tried to assure skeptical U.S. senators that its efforts to combat Ebola were making progress and urged lawmakers to approve US$6.2 billion in new emergency funds to contain the virus.

“We believe we have the right strategy in place, both at home and abroad,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell told the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Separately, the general leading the Ebola fight said the U.S. military force being sent to Liberia to build treatment facilities was expected to top out at about 3,000 troops in December, 1,000 less than initially approved. Ebola has killed at least 5,160 people out of at least 14,098 infected since March, predominantly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the WHO said in its latest status report from Geneva.

However, in a rare piece of good news, the WHO said there were signs that the incidence of new cases was declining in Guinea and Liberia, although it reported steep increases in Sierra Leone.

In Bamako, the nurse died after treating a Guinea man who died with Ebola-like symptoms that were not initially recognized, the government said.