Ebola, more properly known in medical literature as Ebola virus disease or Ebola hemorrhagic fever, is a viral fever known to affect primates, including humans, that causes symptoms such as fever, headaches, sore throat, muscle and joint pain, rash, diarrhea, and vomiting. The virus eventually causes death in roughly half of all patients who fall ill as a result of victim’s bodies losing excessive amounts of blood.
Although very few cases of Ebola have affected Americans, most people in the United States are familiar with Ebola as a result of a total of 11 Americans coming down with the virus in late 2014, two of which ended up passing away as a direct result of the viral fever’s symptoms.
While the Western world hasn’t been ravaged by Ebola, fortunately, people across central Africa haven’t been as lucky. Ebola, which is named after Zaire’s Ebola River, first reared its ugly head back in 1976 in the countries of Zaire and Sudan, with the first outbreak known to humans causing the infection of 284 people across the two nations, over half of whom ended up passing away shortly after getting infected.
Up until yesterday, on Monday, Aug. 12, 2019, the global medical community had no reliable means of effectively treating cases of the deadly viral fever. There have been no clinical trials on drugs that have been shown to effectively treat Ebola, leaving medical practitioners throughout central Africa unsure of how to respond to Ebola.
Fortunately, however, the United Nations’ World Health Organization came out with a report yesterday that released the results of a trial, known formally as The Pamoja Tulinde Maisha trial, which began on Nov. 20, 2018, that supports the use of two of the trial’s drugs over other treatments due to them being significantly more effective than any other treatments currently recognized by the global medical community.
REGN-EB3 and mAb114 are the names of the two drugs that were shown to be reliable and effective in treating Ebola. According to a separate report from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, these two drugs are going to be the only ones used to treat Ebola patients from here on out.
If patients found to be infected with Ebola are treated early enough with one of the two drugs, they have a survival rate higher than 90 percent, according to the World Health Organization’s research.
All of the trials of the four drugs in the study took place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is dealing with one of the world’s worst Ebola problems.
