Isn't a person that is about to die anyway and is willing to take it the exact perfect test subject?
Strange thinking.
By the way, 200k people die each year from measles, that's 199k more than ebola.
Strange thinking.
By the way, 200k people die each year from measles, that's 199k more than ebola.
Success would generate, at best, faint praise. Failure would generate a shitstorm and a half.
Given our rep over there, it could well generate one anyway.
One or two people die of a horrific disease, western doctors in spacesuits show up and spray the village and tell the locals to ignore their traditional burial rituals. Then loads more people get sick.
To a populace who don't understand what is happening and whose education is not that advanced it's easy to see how they could assume the westerners caused the disease to spread.
Wasn't it made in the US?
That's how the use of these drugs is perceived over there. Liberia is historically close to the US and as such more willing to work with unproven western technology in critical times. Others are suspicious even if the things they get is tried and proven for a century.
I really wouldn't put it past big pharma to have discussed that they could use these people as test subjects and get minimal bad press if it fails.
On the other hand, we don't have a reliable treatment for Ebola yet. The combination of having a longish incubation period and being highly contagious give it the potential to be very bad indeed. Hence the proverb 'better the devil you know.'
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6322a4.htm?mobile...
What is needed in the US is a more nuanced view on vaccination, and a realization that one can be against endlessly pushing ever-expanding vaccine regimens, but still in favor of widespread and routine vaccines for those few serious diseases for which vaccination is really ideally suited.
But once everything is black and white, usually both sides are wrong.
(a) people don't see the disease and thus are less scared of it, their imagined consequences of vaccination
and
(b) it appears the government will always choose to vaccinate if a vaccine isn't specifically required to stop disease transmission, the disease itself is not life threatening, and against parental opposition
BTW, I am against the sort of vaccine proliferation which leads the CDC to push for everyone to get an annual flu shot every year, for every kid to be vaccinated against chicken pox, etc. I think there is a real sense of "oh we have a vaccine to prevent that" and that gets pushed regardless of the severity of the illness.
But dividing everything into pro-vax vs anti-vax means we can't have a discussion about when we should be pushing vaccines (measles) and when we really should be leaving it to families to make the decisions (HPV, influenza, chicken pox, etc).
I also think the patient should have had a say in this -- they never even asked him what he wanted to do or mentioned that this was a possibility. He was a doctor and could have given informed consent.
Which makes sense, they already struggle with many Africans who are afraid of western medicine and prefer witch doctors to the strange outsider western doctors. Just a week or two ago I was reading of how western doctors were being turned away from infected villages by road blockades and armed men.
In ebola's entire 40 year history, it has killed less people than measles kills in a single month of any given year.