MOSCOW, August 3 (RIA Novosti) – The UK’s leading public health doctor has blamed the failure to find a vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus on the West’s pharmaceutical industry that is showing no wish to invest in a disease that has so far only affected people in Africa, The Independent has reported.
"We must respond to this emergency as if it was in Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster. We must also tackle the scandal of the unwillingness of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in research [on] treatments and vaccines, something they refuse to do because the numbers involved are, in their terms, so small and don't justify the investment. This is the moral bankruptcy of capitalism acting in the absence of a moral and social framework," Professor John Ashton told the newspaper.
Ashton, the president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, compared the international response to Ebola to that of AIDS, which has killed Africans for years before treatments were developed when it spread to the US and the UK in the 1980s.
"In both cases [AIDS and Ebola], it seems that the involvement of powerless minority groups has contributed to a tardiness of response and a failure to mobilize an adequately resourced international medical response,” Ashton said.
Ashton added: "In the case of AIDS, it took years for proper research funding to be put in place and it was only when so-called 'innocent' groups were involved (women and children, haemophiliac patients and straight men) that the media, politicians, scientific community and funding bodies stood up and took notice."
More than 1,300 people have been infected and 729 killed in the worst Ebola outbreak in history, which has occurred in West Africa for the first time. The infection started in southern Guinea in February and spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria.
Ebola first appeared in 1976 in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Symptoms begin with a fever, muscle pain and a sore throat, and then escalate to vomiting, diarrhea and internal and external bleeding. The incubation period can be up to 21 days. No vaccine currently exists.
