Drug for Ebola out of Africa's reach

A Liberian soldiers stops people at a security checkpoint setup to lamp down on people traveling due to the Ebola virus, on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia, Thursday, Aug. 7, 2014. Soldiers clamped down on people trying to travel to Liberia's capital Thursday from rural areas hard-hit by the Ebola virus hours after the president declared a national state of emergency. (AP Photo/Abbas Dulleh)
A Liberian soldiers stops people at a security checkpoint setup to lamp down on people traveling due to the Ebola virus, on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia, Thursday, Aug. 7, 2014. Soldiers clamped down on people trying to travel to Liberia's capital Thursday from rural areas hard-hit by the Ebola virus hours after the president declared a national state of emergency. (AP Photo/Abbas Dulleh)

MONROVIA, Liberia -- Africans seeking a drug to help contain the Ebola virus will have to wait months before a potentially lifesaving experimental treatment used on two infected Americans is produced in even small amounts, officials said.

And there are no guarantees that the medication known as ZMapp will help curb the spread of the disease, which starts with a fever and body aches and sometimes progresses to serious bleeding. Supplies of the drug are limited, and it has never been tested for safety or effectiveness in humans.

The health minister of Nigeria, one of the four countries where Ebola has broken out, said he had asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about access to the drug. But a CDC spokesman said Wednesday that "there are virtually no doses available."

Some people in other affected countries questioned why the drug has not been offered to infected Africans.

Anthony Kamara, a 27-year-old man riding a bicycle in Freetown, Sierra Leone, said: "Americans are very selfish. They only care about the lives of themselves and no one else."

He referred to ZMapp as "the miracle serum" that Americans have "refused to share with us to save African lives."

The lack of wider availability of the drug "shows simply that white patients and black patients do not have the same value in the eyes of world medicine," said Nouridine Sow, a sociology professor at the Universal Institute of Guinea.

The outbreak first emerged in Guinea and spread to neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia before reaching Nigeria. Almost 1,000 people have died since March.

Some health experts fear that debate over limited supplies of the drug will distract from more proven practices -- identifying, isolating and aggressively treating the sick.

Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said the drug manufacturer has told the U.S. government that it would take two to three months to produce just "a modest amount."

"We don't even know if it works," he stressed.

In Liberia on Thursday, troops in full combat gear deployed in the rain to block people traveling to the capital from rural areas hit by Ebola. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf declared a national state of emergency, and officials said Thursday that no one with a fever would be allowed in or out of the country.

In Sierra Leone, military forces also deployed as part of "Operation Octopus," which officials said was aimed at preventing "the unauthorized movement of Ebola-infected persons."

More than 60 percent of the deaths have occurred in Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to the World Health Organization.

The U.S. State Department on Thursday ordered all eligible family members of U.S. personnel to leave the American Embassy in Liberia's capital city because of the outbreak. In a statement Thursday night, the department said it's taking the action for those not employed by the embassy in Monrovia out of an abundance of caution.

Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown vowed that authorities would conduct stringent surveillance at the country's international airport, where many flights have been canceled because of Ebola.

"We are facing a threat of the greatest proportion," Brown said. "Absolutely no one will be allowed to enter or leave our country with temperature above normal."

The measures began after a man sick with Ebola in Liberia boarded a flight and ended up in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, where a nurse who treated him is now dead from the disease and several other people are infected. The traveler also died.

Ebola is spread only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of people showing symptoms.

Experts warned that extreme security measures risk driving patients and their families further underground.

"Nothing replaces that sense of community trust. So if you come in with brute force, things might appear to be working, but it could be pushing people out where they can't control the borders and the disease gets out," said Dr. David Heymann, professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Sirleaf justified the 90-day state of emergency, saying the outbreak requires "extraordinary measures for the very survival of our state and for the protection of the lives of our people."

She warned that some civil liberties could be suspended. By Thursday, soldiers were already restricting movements on the roads to Monrovia, witnesses said. Some soldiers were deployed to the crossroads town of Klay, about 25 miles west of Monrovia to stop people from three Ebola-infected counties from getting closer to the capital.

The capital already has been hit by the virus, with bodies abandoned in the streets. Relatives are hiding feverish patients at home for fear that if they are taken to isolation centers and don't have Ebola, they will end up contracting it anyway.

Information for this article was contributed by Maria Cheng, Clarence Roy-Macaulay, Lauran Neergaard and staff members of The Associated Press.

A Section on 08/08/2014

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