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Experimental Ebola Drugs May Do More Harm Than Good In Africa

Experimental Ebola Drugs May Do More Harm Than Good In Africa

Following media report that the two Americans that contracted Ebola virus in West Africa had been recuperating incredibly after being put on an experimental Ebola drug, leaders of African countries affected by the disease outbreak have been appealing to the United States, Spain and other countries with experimental drugs to release them for use.

The most popular of the various experimental drugs being shipped to Africa is ZMapp and according to media reports, the three patients that got the drug in Liberia are already showing signs of improvement and the drug has been described by experts as fairly simple.

According to Charles Arntzen, a professor at Arizona State University, ZMapp contains three antibodies that were produced in a tobacco plant. He said what they did was to grind up the plants and purify the antibodies so that they would look like those from the serum (a blood component) of human being.

Health experts in Nigeria believe the risk with ZMapp may be less severe and the risk of something going wrong is minimal.

“Very little could go wrong with ZMapp,” Olusegun Olayinka, an immunologist said.

“The worst that could happen is the drug not being effective in some recipients due to the specificity of the mechanism of action of antibodies. Antibodies would react to specific antigens which means as long as the configuration of the antibodies in the drug is complimentary to the ones on the Ebola virus, the virus would be inactivated and prevented from causing more damage to the patient’s body system.”

He however said the chance of the drug not working is also very high considering the ability of viruses to easily and quickly change the parts of them that could be inactivated by ZMapp’s antibodies.

“Everyone is scared of Ebola and since there is no other option, I reason with African governments who are requesting for ZMapp. And from the scientific point of view, apart from allergic reactions to tobacco components that may still be present, the worst that could happen to a patient who is given ZMapp.”

Trusted Drug Trials

Dr Ganiyu Afolabi however has a contrary opinion. According to him, the fact that the drug is just being tested on a human subject means it cannot be trusted yet and if drugs that are yet to enter clinical phase are released every time there is an outbreak, it could jeopardise the clearly defined and well trusted drug trial protocol.

“It portends great danger for the healthcare system and Africa as a continent. For drug testing, it would be taking us back to the days when there were gross human right abuses during trials and men, women and children were treated like lab rats just to test new drugs,” Afolabi told AFKInsider.

According to Afolabi, pharmaceutical industries too may begin to favour capitalising on outbreaks to test their drugs since they will have to battle with little or no resistance from the FDAs. Even where there is no previous infection, desperate pharmaceutical companies may be tempted to introduce the infection against which their drug was made.

“Some health experts are even remotely thinking we are dealing with an accidental outbreak or bioterrorism. This is nothing strange because we see it in movies and read about such evil ideations in novels,” he said.

He said even if the company that produced ZMapp didn’t intentionally introduce the disease into the African community where it started from, other companies that produce drugs for rare diseases may be tempted to artificially increase the demand for their drugs by introducing the active agent into an unsuspecting African community.

Return on Investment vs. Saving Lives

“Those drugs cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce; the pharmaceutical industry is a multibillion dollar empire and just like any other business, there are expectations on returns from investments. When ZMapp got to the public scene recently, the shares of Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc, the company that produced it, increased significantly.”

“So next time any company anywhere in the world wants to test its drugs in humans, Africa may be their target because there are little rules and enforceable codes of conduct guiding drug testing in human subjects,” he said.

Stressing the dangers of receiving improperly tested drugs, Femi Ilori, a PhD student studying pharmacology at the University of Lagos said the impacts could be felt by future generations.

“We’ve cases where new inborn suffered birth defects and malformations, there are cases where recipients became sterile, deformed or died due to the action of the drug given to them,” Ilori said, warning that African governments should gather their own team of experts to verify the claims of the drug companies and ascertain the drugs’ efficacy and most importantly, their safety, before they are allowed to be used on Africans.

“This is a very hard time for the African countries battling with how to contain the spread of the virus but in addition to that, they fight a bigger battle of securing the safety of future generations and deter drug companies anxious to test their new drugs on human subjects they can easily get in a frightened African nation,” he said.

Ilori noted that Nigeria is taking a right step by subjecting the donated Ebola drugs to the scrutiny of the nation’s National Health Research Ethics Committee.

“The committee did not approve the use of Nano Silver which the American government subtly described as a pesticide. The Nigerian committee said the drug didn’t meet its safety and ethical requirements,” he said.

“Other African countries should have similar processes clearly laid down so that we won’t have a repeat of the botched Pfizer drug trial in northern Nigeria that left scores dead, hundreds deformed and uncountable lives forever modified.”