‘Ebola drug’ finally arrives Liberia

A consignment of experimental Ebola drugs arrived by plane in Liberia on Wednesday to treat two doctors suffering from the virus, Reuters reports.

The drug, ZMapp, arrived in two boxes on a commercial flight from the United States carried by Liberia’s minister of foreign affairs, Augustine Ngafuan.

A Reuters witness said it was unloaded at the VIP terminal.

ZMapp will be taken to a Monrovia hospital and administered to Liberian doctors Zukunis Ireland and Abraham Borbor, who officials said contracted the disease while attending to patients.

WHO health agency said only around 10 to 12 doses of the drug have been made and this raises difficult ethical questions about who should get priority access.

The doctors will be the first Africans to receive it, though it has been given to a Spanish priest who later died and two US aid workers who are reported to have shown signs of recovery.

Authorities are also concerned that ZMapp’s unproven status could leave them open to the charge that humans are being used as guinea pigs.

“This is not the panacea to the problem. It is at the risk of the patient,” Liberia’s assistant health minister Tolbert Nyenswah told journalists at Monrovia’s main airport.

Information Minister Lewis Brown told Reuters the drug merely offered a ‘glimmer of hope’ and its use was little more than a gamble.

Nigerian authorities on Wednesday approved that ZMapp be used by Nigerian patients, even though the manufacturers have said the drug has been exhausted.

Canada has promised to donate 1,000 experimental vaccines to the affected West African countries.