A doctor in rural Liberia inundated with Ebola
patients says he's had good results with a treatment he
tried out of sheer desperation: an HIV drug.
Dr. Gobee Logan has given the drug, lamivudine, to 15
Ebola patients, and all but two survived. That's a 7%
mortality rate.
Across West Africa, the virus has killed 70% of its
victims.
Outside Logan's Ebola center in Tubmanburg, four of his
recovering patients walk the grounds, always staying
inside the fence that separates the Ebola patients from
everyone else.
"My stomach was hurting; I was feeling weak; I was
vomiting," Elizabeth Kundu, 23, says of her bout with the
virus. "They gave me medicine, and I'm feeling fine. We
take it, and we can eat -- we're feeling fine in our
bodies."
Kundu and the other 12 patients who took the
lamivudine and survived, received the drug in the first
five days or so of their illness. The two patients who
died received it between days five and eight.
"I'm sure that when [patients] present early, this
medicine can help," Logan said. "I've proven it right in
my center."
Logan is mindful that lamivudine can cause liver and
other problems, but he says it's worth the risk since
Ebola is so deadly.
He also knows American researchers will say only a real
study can prove effectiveness. That would involve taking
a much larger patient population and giving half of them
lamivudine and the other half a placebo.
"Our people are dying and you're taking about studies?"
he said. "It's a matter of doing all that I can do as a
doctor to save some people's lives."
Logan said he got the idea to try lamivudine when he
read in scientific journals that HIV and Ebola replicate
inside the body in much the same way.
"Ebola is a brainchild of HIV," he said. "It's a
destructive strain of HIV."
At first he tried an HIV drug called acyclovir, but it
didn't seem to be effective. Then he tried lamivudine on
a healthcare worker who'd become ill, and within a day
or two he showed signs of improvement and survived.
No comments:
Post a Comment