#BreakingNews: Ebola Drug Supply Is Exhausted After Doses Sent to Africa

The Ebola drug given to two Americans and a
Spanish priest has been sent to treat infected
doctors in two West African countries, and the
supply of the medicine
is now gone, its manufacturer said.
Countries including Nigeria and Liberia had
requested the drug, called ZMapp. Mapp
Biopharmaceutical Inc.,based in San Diego , said
it has complied with every request for the drug
that was authorized by legal and
regulatory authorities.
The drug was provided at no.cost, according to
Mapp.
“It is our understanding that all patients
offered treatment, treated, or expected to be
treated were or are highly capable of providing
informed consent for the use of an experimental
drug not yet evaluated for safety in animals or
people,” the company said yesterday in a
statement.

Mapp and its partners, Defyrus Inc. and a
subsidiary of Reynolds American Inc., are
working with the U.S. government to quickly
increase production, the company said.
“Additional resources are being brought to bear
on scaling up,” the company said. “The
emergency use of an experimental medicine is a
highly unusual situation.”
Mapp, in its statement, didn’t identify which
countries had received the remaining doses.
The
company said those who requested the drug can
reveal their
acquisition or use of the experimental drug.
The Ebola outbreak has killed 1,013 of the 1,848
people infected in West Africa as of Aug. 9, the
World Health Organization said in a statement on
its website. While other diseases are much more
common and deadly, there is no cure for Ebola
and it has moved quickly between countries,
putting the global health community in high alert.

Widespread malaria, which killed more
than 600,000 people last year, is preventable and
curable, according to the WHO.
Bloomberg

Read more here
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/
news/2014-08-11/ebola-drug-supply-is-
exhausted-after-doses-sent-to-africa.html