TUESDAY, Aug. 13, 2019 (HealthDay News) — New drugs cured two Ebola patients in Congo, showing that people can recover from the highly lethal disease if it is 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,” Jean-Jacques Muyembe, M.D., Ph.D., director of Congo’s National Institute for Biomedical Research, said at a press conference, the Associated Press reported. “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.”
The two drugs — REGN-EB3 and mAb-114 — are monoclonal antibodies that block Ebola and are now being “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 for death from Ebola.
Copyright © 2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
