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.
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
<http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/theyd-find-a-cure-if-ebola-came-to-london-9644515.html>,
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.
