Public-health officials split on use of control groups in tests of experimental treatments.
With clinical trials of experimental Ebola treatments set to begin in December, public-health officials face a major ethical quandary: should some participants be placed in a control group that receives only standard symptomatic treatment, despite a mortality rate of around 70% for Ebola in West Africa?
Two groups planning trials in Guinea and Liberia are diverging on this point, and key decisions for both are likely to come this week. US researchers meet on 11 November at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, to discuss US-government sponsored trials. A separate group is gathering at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, on 11 and 12 November to confer on both the US effort and trials organized by the WHO with help from African and European researchers and funded by the Wellcome Trust and the European Union.
Source: www.nature.com
I have to say – faced with a deadly disease, I think it is UNethical to have control / placebo arms of any trial.
Seriously: what about comparing ZMapp and immune serum, for example, with historical records of previous standard of care outcomes rather than directly?
I know if I were an Ebola patient, and I saw someone else getting the experimental therapy and I didn’t, that I would have a few things to say.
It’s not as if these therapies have not been tested in primates, after all – in fact, both the ChAd3 and MVA-based vaccines and ZMapp have been thoroughly tested in macaques, as have the other therapeutics, with no adverse events there.
I say if people say clearly that they want an experimental intervention, that they should get one: after all, the first use of immune serum was not done in a clinical trial, but rather as a last-ditch let’s-see-if-this-works intervention – yet its use does not seem controversial?
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