

Opting Against Ebola Drug for Ill African Doctor - anigbrowl
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/world/africa/ebola.html

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Aqueous
"“What they really didn’t want to do was kill Dr. Khan with their attempt at
therapy,” said Dr. Armand Sprecher, a public health specialist at Doctors
Without Borders. “If word got out that M.S.F. killed Dr. Khan, that would have
implications for outbreak control,” he added, using the initials for the
French name of the relief group."

It is really difficult to challenge this line of reasoning from the sidelines.
Doctors especially those directly involved in public health are forced to make
utilitarian decisions like this all the time - weighing the greater good
against the good of an individual. People on the ground in West Africa are
much better equipped than any of us in the West in assessing the risk of such
a rumor damaging outbreak control efforts.

That said, it doesn't say whether they considered giving Dr. Khan the drug
secretly. It seems like such a thing would be possible, and they could
disclose that he had received the drug after the outbreak had started to slow
down (which hopefully will happen soon).

~~~
einhverfr
Also consider this: Ebola seems to have about a 60% mortality rate. This means
that if he survives you can't credit the drug and since you don't know how
effective it is, you can't blame death on it either. Not until you have more
data.

But this means the decision is political and rightly so. I don't know how I
feel about foreign aid workers being the first to try the drug. On one hand
they are politically safe. On the other hand, it looks like Western Privilege.

These things have no good answers. Sometimes we are left choosing between bad
possibilities.

~~~
true_religion
Isn't a 60% mortality rate particularly high?

And if you give someone a drug and they consequently show a reversal of their
symptoms instead of a slow die off as immune response kicks in, doesn't that
pretty heavily imply that the drug worked?

I'm not against full clinical trials and the like, but I doubt that's a
possibility with an epedemic like disease like ebola.

~~~
einhverfr
It's very high, but it is at a point where you cannot credit or blame the drug
for success or failure in a specific case. You need aggregate data. The point
is about the political vs the scientific perspective and that these are not
aligned.

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ck2
Isn't a person that is about to die anyway and is willing to take it the exact
perfect test subject?

Strange thinking.

By the way, 200k people die each year from measles, that's 199k more than
ebola.

~~~
drivingmenuts
That wasn't the point. The point was that the drug was very experimental,
produced in a country that's not trustworthy, with an unknown chance of
success.

Success would generate, at best, faint praise. Failure would generate a
shitstorm and a half.

Given our rep over there, it could well generate one anyway.

~~~
ars
> produced in a country that's not trustworthy

Wasn't it made in the US?

~~~
pgeorgi
Exactly. Guinea's health minister said something along the lines of "If the
WHO thinks that our citizens should serve as test subjects for these drugs,
that's something we'll need to debate with them".

That's how the use of these drugs is perceived over there. Liberia is
historically close to the US and as such more willing to work with unproven
western technology in critical times. Others are suspicious even if the things
they get is tried and proven for a century.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "That's how the use of these drugs is perceived over there."

I really wouldn't put it past big pharma to have discussed that they could use
these people as test subjects and get minimal bad press if it fails.

------
eip
[https://www.google.com/search?q=ebola+vitamin+c](https://www.google.com/search?q=ebola+vitamin+c)

To date, no viral infection has been demonstrated to be resistant to the
proper dosing of vitamin C as classically demonstrated by Klenner. However,
not all viruses have been treated with Klenner-sized vitamin C doses, or at
least the results have not been published. Ebola viral infection and the other
acute viral hemorrhagic fevers appear to be diseases that fall into this
category. Because of the seemingly exceptional ability of these viruses to
rapidly deplete vitamin C stores, even larger doses of vitamin C would likely
be required in order to effectively reverse and eventually cure infections
caused by these viruses.

~~~
lambda
This sounds like pseudoscience. Your search results also look like either
pseudoscience (a "Vitamin C foundation" with 90s style marquee text and Google
hit counts for "vitamin c ebola" to bolster its case), or real science that
just happens to tangentially mention vitamin C (such as
[http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/179/Supplement_1/S18.f...](http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/179/Supplement_1/S18.full)
on the use of blood transfusion from recovered patients for treating ebola).

You also manage to embed the "no true Scotsman" fallacy into your very short
argument; "no viral infection has been demonstrated to be resistant to the
proper dosing of vitamin C" is trivially true if you just say that any failed
treatment simply wasn't using a "proper dosing of vitamin C".

~~~
sliverstorm
It's certainly amusing to imagine the argument, "If a disease has not been
cured using vitamin C, that simply means they were not given ENOUGH VITAMIN C
_whips out wheelbarrow of oranges_ "

