The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Following the recovery and discharge of the eight Ebola Sudan Virus Disease patients who were contacts of a health worker who succumbed to the disease in January, experts say continuity of a study to find treatment will be hard.
There is currently no confirmed and approved treatment for the Sudan virus strain even as there are several approved treatments for another strain called Zaire ebolavirus.
According to Dr Ngashi Ngongo, an expert from the Africa CDC, all the recovered eight recovered patients had been receiving an antiviral drug called remdesivir whose effectiveness against Sudan virus disease has not yet been approved.
Ngashi said while the plan was to test three treatments including monoclonal antibodies, and convalescent plasma where patients are treated with the blood plasma of a person who has recovered from the viral disease, the current lack of patients has not made that possible and a full randomized trial cannot happen.
By Tuesday, none of the 216 contacts that had been listed and were being followed up had developed symptoms consistent with the disease. This suggests it’s unlikely that there will be new patients requiring treatment for Ebola in the current outbreak declared on January 30th.
Uganda has previously had seven outbreaks of the Sudan strain but there hasn’t been any successful study to provide results for the introduction of either a vaccine or a treatment specifically targeting it.
However, while the fate of the therapeutics study hangs in the balance, Dr Mosoka Fallah, the Acting Director for Science and Innovation at the CDC but is deployed in Uganda for the Ebola response says the vaccine study is continuing in contacts.
He says the African CDC is now deploying a team to track the safety of the vaccine in those who received it. This vaccine study started in 2022 during the outbreak in Mubende and Kassanda but was halted when the outbreak was declared over.
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