Pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to
invest in vaccines and research to cure the
deadly Ebola disease because it is only
killing Africans, a leading UK doctor has
claimed.
The President of the UK Faculty of Public
Health, Prof. John Ashton, has claimed no
cure for the disease has been discovered
because it so far has only affected powerless
minorities.
He likened the response to that of Aids, for
which treatments were developed only when
it started affecting Western countries.
The current Ebola outbreak – which has no
vaccine, no cure and kills up to 90 per cent of
victims – is currently ravaging the West
African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone,
Nigeria and Liberia.
There have been 729 deaths from 1,329
confirmed cases of Ebola in this year’s
epidemic – making it the largest Ebola
outbreak in history.
Writingin the Independent on Sunday , Prof.
Ashton said: ‘We must respond to this
emergency as if it was in Kensington,
Chelsea, and Westminster.
‘We must also tackle the scandal of the
unwillingness of the pharmaceutical industry
to invest in research to produce treatments
and vaccines, something they refuse to do
because the numbers involved are, in their
terms, so small and don’t justify the
investment.
‘This is the moral bankruptcy of capitalism
acting in the absence of an ethical and social
framework.’
WHO Director-General, Margaret Chan, has
also warned the virus is currently moving
faster than efforts to control it.
She said, ‘This outbreak is moving faster
than our efforts to control it. If the situation
continues to deteriorate, the consequences
can be catastrophic in terms of lost lives,
severe socioeconomic disruption and a high
risk of spread to other countries.’
Speaking at a meeting in Guinea’s capital,
Conakry, she told the presidents of Guinea,
Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast that the
virus could be stopped.
But she said that cultural practices such as
traditional burials were a significant cause of
its spread.
Meanwhile, Emirates, the Mideast’s largest
airline, said today it had halted flights to
Guinea because of concerns about the
spread of the Ebola virus.

www.punchng.com/news/why-ebola-remains-incurable-uk-doc/

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