Ebola treatments caught in limbo

Medical relief workers fighting a burgeoning Ebola outbreak in West Africa have not been welcomed with open arms. Death was all that the hazmat-suited visitors seemed to bring. 

Most patients who entered the makeshift hospitals died, their families forbidden to handle their bodies. Rumours flew that these newcomers were harvesting organs and conducting fatal experiments.

So people scattered, making a bad situation worse. The outbreak, the biggest recorded in Ebola history, has so far killed more than 670 people in West Africa and is thought to have infected about 400 more, and it shows no sign of abating.

Doctors have no cure to offer the infected. Understaffed clinics must make do with isolating infected people, finding and quarantining their families, and educating the public on how to avoid spreading the disease. Although several vaccines and treatments for Ebola do exist, they are stalled in various stages of testing owing to a lack of funding and of international demand. Even if they did move forwards, it would be years rather than months before the measures would reach the people in need.

For researchers such as Heinz Feldmann, a virologist at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) in Hamilton, Montana, the situation seems like it could have been avoided. In 2005, he published a vaccine platform based on vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) that has since yielded an Ebola vaccine that is effective in macaques. But money is not available to take the next step — testing the vaccine’s safety in healthy humans, says Feldmann. Compared with malaria or HIV, “Ebola is just not that much of a public-health problem worldwide”, he says, and consequently draws little interest from public or private funders.