"As doctors, trying an untested drug on
patients is a very difficult choice since
our first priority is to do no harm, and
we would not be sure that the experimental
treatment would do more harm than good."
There are fates worse than death. And then ethics: Is it right to use patients who fear for their live as medical test subjects? Is it really an "informed consent" if a person who fears for its live gets promised a "possible cure", even if that cure could do ANYTHING? If someone tortured you and you started saying "I do everything, just stop it!" - would that be informed consent? Isn't Ebola a natural version of torture? And so on ...
It's easy to say "it worked! We cannot justify to not help those people who will die anyway", but there is NO guarantee that it will work a third time. It could dissolve the organs of the next person. And then it wouldn't sound so great anymore, would it?
Even if it dissolved the organs of the next 2 people it'd still be a better survival rate than Ebola itself (I understand this strain has a 60% mortality rate, not 90%), so yes, it would still be great.
Either way, this is a choice that the patient should make for themselves. It may be ethically dubious to offer experimental drugs to dying patients, but it is obviously and completely morally and ethically reprehensible to deny a possible cure to someone who is dying and wants to give the cure a try.
I don't see how treating that one patient will prevent "treatment and control of future outbreaks", either.
Unfounded assumption. I'd love to be given the opportunity to maybe live, and have to avoid reproducing, instead of being forced to consider possibilities that may have no basis in fact. If I'm days away from dying, and my only alternative is that I can take a magic pill that means I shouldn't have children, then I won't have children. It's not exactly a dilemma.
> Is it right to use patients who fear for their live as medical test subjects?
Is it right to give someone the opportunity to control their own destiny?
> Is it really an "informed consent" if a person who fears for its live gets promised a "possible cure", even if that cure could do ANYTHING?
The 'cure' showed some positive preliminary results in lab animals.
> It could dissolve the organs of the next person
Ebola doesn't literally liquefy your organs, but the virus destroys your liver and kidneys.
While I agree with your broad point, your reasoning here is facile because it assumes reliable foreknowledge. It's possible that you might not knoew that you shouldn't have children until after you've done so and things have turned out very badly; consider for example the administration of thalidomide during pregnancy, which turned out to produce horrific birth defects, or diethylstilberol, which turned out to cause tumors in the daughters of women who took it during pregnancy (a fact which was not discovered until many years after the drug was first administered).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol
Is it right to give someone the opportunity to control their own destiny?
Get it wrong and you may be doing the exact opposite, as possibility you seem to have overlooked. Good intentions are not automatically ethical, unless those intentions have a sound probabilistic basis. Tort law is full of stories about people who thought they were helping and who ultimately made things much, much worse.
Or where diseases like polio left children crippled for the rest of their lives?
Or where diabetes sufferers went blind, or had bits of their legs fall off?
Ugh. This is as bad as arguing with the anti-vaccination crowd.
Look, pathogens will adapt. That's evolution - deal with it. But does that mean that as humans, blessed with our intellect and skills, we shouldn't try to improve our lot in life?