Who Are Ebola's Guinea Pigs?
It's a controversial image, to be sure: two white, U.S. health workers receive doses of a serum that appears to save their lives, while hundreds of other Ebola sufferers, almost all of them black Africans, go without. The image has sparked outrage and calls to reform the way experimental treatments are dispersed.
Before tinkering with a system designed to protect people from unsafe and ineffective drugs, it's valuable to examine the grounds for the outrage. How was it, after all, that Kent Brantly and Nancy Whitebol, U.S. volunteers for the charity Samaritan's Purse, having contracted Ebola while working in Liberia, became the only patients to receive ZMapp, an unapproved drug that had been tested only in animals?… Seguir leyendo »