TUESDAY, Aug. 13, 2019 — New drugs cured two Ebola patients in Congo, which shows that people can recover from the highly lethal disease if it’s diagnosed and treated early, doctors say.
“These cases were detected very quickly. The husband was infected, he was at home for 10 days and his wife and son were infected,” Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director of Congo’s National Institute for Biomedical Research, said at a press conference, the Associated Pressreported.
“As soon as the response teams detected these cases, they brought them here to the treatment center. We gave them treatment that is effective and here in a short time both are cured,” Muyembe said.
The two drugs are antibodies that block Ebola and “are now be used to treat Ebola patients because, according to the studies and the results we obtained in the lab, these are the two drugs that are effective,” Muyembe said, the AP reported.
Earlier this week, preliminary results from two trials in Congo suggested that the two drugs significantly reduced the risk of death from Ebola.