A consignment of experimental Ebola drugs arrived by plane in Liberia on Wednesday to treat two doctors suffering from the virus, which has killed more than 1,000 people across four West African countries.
The drug, ZMapp, arrived in two boxes on a commercial flight from the United States carried by Liberia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Augustine Ngafuan, and was unloaded at the VIP terminal, a Reuters witness said.
It will be taken to a hospital in the capital and administered to Liberian doctors Zukunis Ireland and Abraham Borbor, who officials said contracted the disease while attending to patients, including a late colleague.
The world’s worst outbreak of Ebola has claimed the lives of 1,069 people and there are 1,975 probable and suspected cases, the vast majority in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to new figures from the World Health Organisation.
The U.N. health agency said only around 10 to 12 doses of the drug have been made and this raises difficult ethical questions about who should get priority access.
The doctors will be the first Africans to receive it, though it has been given to a Spanish priest who later died and two U.S. aid workers who are reported to have shown signs of recovery.
Authorities are also concerned that ZMapp’s unproven status could leave them open to the charge that humans are being used as guinea pigs.
“This is not the panacea to the problem. It is at the risk of the patient,” Liberia’s Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah told journalists at Monrovia’s main airport.
Information Minister Lewis Brown told Reuters the drug merely offered a “glimmer of hope” and its use was little more than a gamble.
Even so, the clamor for it is strong given that the contagious hemorrhagic disease is killing more than half of its victims and there is no known cure or vaccine.
“I welcome it. It is very good. Our nurses are dying. If you bring them the medication it will make them stronger to fight Ebola,” said stationery seller James Liburd, in Monrovia.
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