Ebola patients at a treatment centre in Sierra Leone have been given a heart drug that is untested against the virus in animals and humans, a move that has been deemed reckless by one senior scientist and has prompted UK medical staff at the centre to leave.
A 14-strong team of British doctors, nurses and paramedics stopped working at the Lakka treatment centre in Freetown because of their concerns over what they considered the experimental and potentially dangerous use of the drug, and other safety issues.
The 22-bed treatment centre is run by Emergency, an Italian NGO set up by heart surgeon Gino Strada to bring world-class cardiac surgery to some of the poorest parts of Africa.
Emergency says it wants to give patients the standard of care they would get in Europe, both at its Ebola treatment centre (ETC) at Lakka and at a new 100-bed centre at Goderich in Freetown, built by the British army and funded by the Department for International Development (DfID).
But UK volunteers sent to work in Lakka in late November felt Emergency’s approach was too ambitious and may have contributed to a death rate higher than at some other centres.
Emergency has stopped using the drug, amiodarone, after a request from DfID, which had been alerted by the British medics. It says it is planning a formal trial.
Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, which is funding drug trials starting in west Africa, said it would be reckless to use amiodarone, which affects the heart, other than under strict conditions. “This is the sort of terrible consequence of not having a logical, sensible approach. I think it is reckless not doing this in carefully controlled conditions.”
Farrar, a member of the World Health Organisation scientific and technical advisory committee that is looking at potential Ebola drugs, said amiodarone “was considered for the WHO priority list and it was decided it was not on the priority list. It doesn’t mean to say it is absolutely terrible, but you shouldn’t really be using it unless you have got very careful monitoring of the heart. What we see sometimes in the lab does not translate into having an antiviral effect in humans.”
Farrar believes it is vital that well set-up clinical trials should be carried out in the epidemic to discover treatments that work.
Read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/22/ebola-untested-drug-patients-sierra-leone-uk-staff-leave
