Liberian officials fear Ebola could soon spread through the capital's largest slum after residents raided a quarantine center for suspected patients and took items including bloody sheets and mattresses. Photo: Getty Images
The husband of an American missionary under treatment for Ebola at Emory University Hospital said Monday his wife is gaining strength, while three ill Liberian doctors who were given an experimental drug also showed signs of improvement.
Four Ebola patients in Nigeria were also recovering.
American missionary David Writebol said that he had been released on Sunday from quarantine in Charlotte, North Carolina, and traveled the same day to Atlanta to visit his wife, Nancy Writebol, who is in a special isolation unit at Emory.
"I have had the great joy to be able to look through the isolation room glass and see my beautiful wife again," he said in a statement provided by SIM USA, the organization the Writebols were working for in Liberia. "She was standing with her radiant smile, happy beyond words. She is continuing to slowly gain strength, eager for the day when the barriers separating us are set aside and we can simply hold each other."
Ms. Writebol, 59, became infected with Ebola when she was working on a crew that decontaminated health staff emerging from an Ebola treatment center operated by SIM USA and a partner organization, Samaritan's Purse, outside Monrovia. She was diagnosed three weeks ago and treated in Liberia until she was evacuated to Emory nearly two weeks ago.
Mr. Writebol was quarantined after arriving in Charlotte a week ago, because he had been exposed to his infected wife. He said he was released Sunday after completing a 21-day period of monitoring for symptoms that began while he was in Liberia.
While under treatment in Liberia, Ms. Writebol and an American doctor infected with Ebola, Kent Brantly, received an experimental drug, called ZMapp, that is made by San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. and had never been tested in humans.
In Liberia, three doctors who were given the same drug were "showing signs of improvement" on Monday, said the country's information minister, Lewis Brown. A fourth doctor who had originally been scheduled to receive the experimental treatment began recovering on his own before he got it, so it was given to another doctor.
Though still fragile, their recoveries offer a hopeful sign for a country that only had 51 doctors before Ebola struck, according to the World Health Organization, and which has lost 36 health care workers since. Liberia is a country of just four million people, recovering from a civil war on the backs of a very few college graduates. In an indication of how tightknit the country remains, Mr. Brown said one of the doctors taking Zmapp includes a friend of his from high school.
Nigeria reported similar good news on Monday, saying three health-care workers there, plus a fourth individual, were all recovering from their own Ebola ordeals, said Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu. All of them contracted the disease from a Liberian-American airline passenger who landed in the city of Lagos last month in the throes of the infection's final, fatal stages.
Unlike Liberia, Nigeria didn't use ZMapp, though it did briefly consider nanosilver, which is silver broken down by nanotechnology. It is used in children's plush toys and as a countertop disinfectant, but as a dietary supplement its backers say it could enter cells and fight everything from AIDS to cancer to malaria.
"They also had good results with diabetes and high blood pressure," said Dan McAneny, author of "The Silver Water Coincidences." "That sounds like a crazy, too-good-to-be-true thing but you know what? It's never been tried on Ebola."
Nigeria's National Health Research Ethics Committee said it didn't pass their standards. "The bottom line is that we are not using it," said Mr. Chukwu, the health minister.
—Gbenga Akingbule in Abuja, Nigeria, contributed to this article.
Write to Betsy McKay at betsy.mckay@wsj.com and Drew Hinshaw atdrew.hinshaw@wsj.com
No comments:
Post a Comment