Scientists have revealed that Ebola is no longer an incurable disease after successful trials carried out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were able to save multiple lives.
Ebola treatments are now carried out by use of monoclonal antibody drugs reports The guardian.
“From now on, we will no longer say that Ebola is incurable,” said Prof Jean-Jacques Muyembe, the director general of the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale in DRC, which has overseen the trial. “These advances will help save thousands of lives.”
The DRC outbreak which is the second largest with over 2,800 cases suffered setbacks as infected persons were reluctant to seek treatment.
“Now that 90% of their patients can go into the treatment centre and come out completely cured, they will start believing it and building trust in the population and community,” he said.
“This trial – the first-ever multi-drug randomised trial for Ebola – has happened despite such highly complex and challenging circumstance,” said Dr Jeremy Farrar, the director of Wellcome and the co-chair of the WHO Ebola therapeutics group.
“A long-running outbreak like this takes a terrible toll on the communities affected and it is a sign of just how difficult this epidemic has been to control that there have already been enough patients treated to tell us more about the efficacy of these four drugs.”
“The more we learn about these two treatments, and how they can complement the public health response, including contact tracing and vaccination, the closer we can get to turning Ebola from a terrifying disease to one that is preventable and treatable. We won’t ever get rid of Ebola but we should be able to stop these outbreaks from turning into major national and regional epidemics,” he said.
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