Ebola: Lessons learned

Treating COVID-19—Off-Label Drug Use, Compassionate Use, and Randomized Clinical Trials During Pandemics

“…One reason is because virtually all studies were single-group interventions without concurrent controls, which led to no definitive conclusion related to efficacy or safety. Despite much resistance and controversy regarding asking patients with EVD to participate in a randomized clinical trial (RCT), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) conducted the first and only RCT during that outbreak. It took several months to design the trial, but it was implemented and successfully launched during the outbreak; however, it was too late for the RCT to be completed .…”

Editor's Choice

“…As the acute Ebola epidemic in West Africa flickers out (42 days having passed, at the time of writing, without a fresh infection in two of the three countries affected), it was dismaying to learn that the infection has reared its ugly head again: in the case of volunteer Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey (reminding us of the virus's tendency to hide in immunologically privileged sites, [8] raising the spectre of unrecognised complications among survivors in countries in which healthcare services were decimated by the outbreak), and a few new cases in Guinea. Statements from the Royal Free Hospital, London, and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said that the 39-year-old nurse, no longer infectious, was well enough to return to Scotland and had been transferred to the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow to complete her hospital treatment.…”