and produced there if it works in the two aid workers, bypassing the FDA approval process it will have to survive to be marketed in the US or most of the developed world.

The truth is that this drug is so early in the approval process that it has never been given to human beings before, it's only worked in animals.

The last time I've seen drugs early in the approval process circumvent that process and go directly to dying patients was in the later 80s, when big city hospitals were getting slammed with desperately ill people and there was nothing we could do without experimental drugs. Double blind studies were not done but I still shudder when I remember the paperwork.

Once the crisis was over, the FDA rules went back into effect, with double blind studies being done on new drugs.

The real hope for Ebola-Zaire is a vaccine.

The animal models of disease do not often translate to humans. A treatment that works in mice most often does not work in humans. But when death is the nearly inevitable conclusion, compassionate exceptions may be made.

Medicine is always an ethical discipline. Primum non nocere. That maxim may be set aside only in extraordinary circumstances. This Ebola outbreak may very well be one of them.

"Well, they're not going to get any deader if this doesn't work" in times of crisis. The mid to late 80s were such a time. This might be another of them.

The drug has been developed from tobacco plants. My sour side notes that this is the first time that plant has ever been particularly useful.

It is entirely aligned with primum non nocere.