As two Ebola-stricken U.S. missionaries slowly recover at Emory University Hospital, the disease’s death toll soars in West Africa.
But the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control told Congress on Thursday that the experimental ZMapp treatment given to Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol will not be available for wide use in Africa.
“We will look at any way to try to expedite development or production” of experimental Ebola treatments, Dr. Thomas Freiden told a U.S. House subcommittee holding a rare emergency hearing while Congress is on its August break.
“But I don’t want any false hopes out there. Right now we don’t know if they work. … We might not have effective available treatment in three months or six months or one year or five years. But we have today the means to stop the outbreak.”
Frieden also said it is inevitable that an Ebola case or cases will come to the United States — an airline passenger without symptoms may grow ill after arriving here, for example — but he does not believe there will be a widespread outbreak in this country. That danger is in West Africa.
Frieden said the outbreak will soon take more victims than all previous Ebola outbreaks combined, but it can be contained in Africa by finding and isolating cases, and educating people about the disease.
“I’m confident that if we do what works we will stop this one also, but it won’t be quick and it won’t be easy,” Frieden said. “It will take meticulous work. If we leave behind even a single burning ember, like a forest fire, it flares back up.”
Frieden said five more people have been tested for Ebola in the U.S. after returning from Africa with suspected symptoms of the disease, but they all came up negative. He would not say where the people were tested, and he said the CDC and the Defense Department are working to get an Ebola test to more labs around the country.
The ZMapp serum remains a subject of global debate, and it wasn’t even clear on Thursday where the doses given to Brantly and Writebol came from. Samaritan’s Purse, the charity that Brantly was working for, offered a different story from the one supplied by government officials.
Frieden told reporters after the hearing that “it was Samaritan’s Purse that desperately wanted to get any treatment to their two staff members. Our staff member referred them to the (National Institutes of Health) and the NIH referred them to the company.”
The NIH gave the same sequence of events in a statement and added, “NIH did not have an official role in procuring, transporting, approving or administering the experimental products administered to the two U.S. patients.”
But Ken Isaacs, Samaritan’s Purse vice president for program and government relations, said those statements are inaccurate.
Asked by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about how the treatment found its way to Writebol and Brantly, Isaacs said: “We had nothing to do with it. People from the NIH came to us. They said it might be available. We sent them to talk to the patients and the physicians. They made that decision on the ground and that medicine arrived there.
“We don’t even know where it came from. It arrived there, and it was given to them. It was an informed consent given by the patients. … Trust me, I had zero knowledge (of) any experimental medicine that did that. None of us did.”
As for Writebol and Brantly, Isaacs said, they are in “serious but stable condition” and feel guilty about leaving their work in Liberia.
“This disease, it is survivable, but I can tell you even when you get intensive supportive care, it is an incredibly serious disease and it takes a long time to recover from,” he said.
Isaacs and Dr. Frank Glover, of Thomasville, a medical missionary for SIM who has traveled frequently to Liberia, painted a grim picture for the committee of the spread of Ebola in West Africa.
Fear of the disease is migrating to Nigeria, where U.S. citizen Patrick Sawyer died last month of the disease and infected more people in the hospital where he was treated. Lagos, the city where Sawyer died, has 21 million people. Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, the three countries where the outbreak began, have that many people combined.
Frieden said he was “deeply, deeply concerned” about Nigeria. Said Isaacs, “I think we’re going to see death tolls in numbers we can’t imagine right now.”
Isaacs said the response to the outbreak has been “a failure” and that Samaritan’s Purse epidemiologists were sounding alarms as far back as April that this would be a major outbreak, to no avail.
U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., chairman of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee holding the hearing, said Congress should look at increasing funding to prepare for global pandemics — a line item that has plunged from $201 million in 2010 to $72.5 million this year.
U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., told Frieden and top officials from the State Department and USAID that they don’t have to wait until a new fiscal year and can ask Congress for the authority to move money around now to more urgent priorities.
Frieden did not come asking for emergency spending, though his testimony noted that President Barack Obama’s budget requests $45 million for the CDC to “accelerate progress in detection, prevention and response.”
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