‘Ebola drug would take months to produce’

Africans battling to contain the spread of ebola will have to wait for months until a potentially life-saving experimental drug used on two Americans infected with the dreaded disease would be manufactured, officials said.

Soldiers in two of the infected countries have been deployed to try to stem further spread of the virus.

Even if the experimental drug ZMapp is produced in large quantities, its ability to treat ebola is unproven, and no commitment has been publicly made to provide it to Africa.

The news came as the first European infected by a strain of ebola that has killed more than 932 people in West Africa, Spanish priest Miguel Pajares, was stable in a Madrid hospital after being airlifted from Liberia, health authorities said.

Pajares, 75, was working for a non-governmental organisation in Liberia and was repatriated along with co-worker Juliana Bohi, a nun who has tested negative for the disease.

“The patients have arrived well, though a little dis-oriented,” Madrid health official Javier Rodriguez told a news conference.

“They are both now in quarantine,” he added.

The army blockaded rural areas hit by the deadly virus in Sierra Leone, said a senior officer, after neighbouring Liberia declared a state of emergency to tackle the worst outbreak of the disease.

Worried Liberians queued at banks and stocked up on food in markets in the ramshackle capital Monrovia while others took buses to unaffected parts of the West African country after Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president, announced the powers lasting for 90 days.

The state of emergency allows Liberia’s government to curtail civil rights and to deploy troops and police to impose quarantines on badly affected communities to try to contain an epidemic that has struck four west African nations. “Everyone is afraid,” said civil servant Cephus Togba. “Big and small they are all panicking. Everyone is stocking up the little they have.”

With troops setting up checkpoints on the way to some of Monrovia’s worst- hit towns, Johnson Sirleaf justified the measures by saying that the state of emergency was necessary for “the very survival of our state and for the protection of the lives of our people”.

In Geneva, World Health Organisation experts were holding a second day of talks to agree emergency measures to tackle the virus and whether to declare an international public health emergency.

After a trial drug based on the tobacco plant was administered to two US charity workers infected in Liberia, ebola specialists have urged the WHO to offer Africans the chance to take such experimental drugs. The UN agency has asked medical ethics experts to explore this option.

However, the health minister of Nigeria, one of the four countries where ebola has broken out, told a news conference in Washington that he had asked the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about access to the drug. But a CDC spokesman said “there are virtually no doses available”.

Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said the manufacturer has told the US government that it would take two to three months to produce even “a modest amount”.

“We don’t even know if it works,” he stressed.

President Barack Obama pledged to help “nip as early as possible any additional outbreaks of the disease”.

“I think it’s entirely appropriate for us to see if there are additional drugs or medical treatments that can improve the survivability of what is a very deadly and obviously brutal disease,” he said.

While the outbreak has now reached four countries in West Africa, Liberia and Sierra Leone account for more than 60% of deaths.

“This outbreak, because of its size and its geographical extent, certainly merits an extraordinary response and we know countries have announced they must take extraordinary measures, so that is understandable from a public health perspective,” WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said in Geneva.