Ebola ethics

Interesting to see the kinds of attention that has been given to the most recent Ebola outbreak in Africa. Part of the reason is that it is a serious epidemic, causing nearly a thousand deaths so far, and it is occurring in West Africa, rather than its usual stomping ground of the Democratic Republic of Congo and thereabouts. Another reason is that some Americans overseas have been infected, and medically evacuated back home, so the story involves not only the familiar 'death exoticism' of faraway anonymous Africans, but has a US domestic component as well.

Perhaps because it involves American citizens, bioethicists have been more active in commenting on the ethics of Ebola control than they were during outbreaks of times past. Two of the infected Americans have been treated with an experimental Ebola drug, the access to treatment being aided and abetted by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control no less. Bioethicists, chronic worriers that we apparently are, worry about this development. If the drug has not been FDA approved, how do we know that it is safe and effective? Even if the conditions of the American patients improve, how do we know whether the drug itself is responsible, if no rigorous clinical trial has been conducted? Why would people continue to join clinical studies if they could gain access to experimental drugs outside the FDA's vetting system?

All fine and good, as worries go. But I wonder what would happen if the Ebola outbreak happened in Louisiana rather than Liberia. Would the American public and leadership -- including its bioethicists -- be so sanguine about waiting years for the results of clinical trials before trying some promising-looking drugs out? Faced with an infectious disease with a very high mortality rate, would we revisit and loosen the rules or hold firmly to the tenets of evidence-based medicine? Is the latter what happened, say, early on during the US HIV epidemic? Or is the ethics a bit different when it is largely somebody else's deadly epidemic? For its part, the World Health Organisation seems more open to the use of not fully tested treatments, for Africans, given that the current alternative for most of those affected is (as the Director of the Wellcome Trust put it) a tepid sponge bath and the promise of a nice burial.

UPDATE: The Scientist issued a short piece on the subject of Ebola and ethics last night, and USA Today has a piece up, with reader comments.