NEW YORK: All three US facilities established to quickly make vaccines and therapeutics in the event of a major public health threat say they are standing by to support any US government effort to scale up a treatment for Ebola.
The facilities, called Centres for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing (ADM), were set up by the US Department of Health and Human Services in partnership with private industry, to respond to pandemics or chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear threats.
They have the expertise to quickly switch production lines to manufacture, for example, a smallpox vaccine if that scourge were to re-emerge, or an anthrax vaccine, and other life-saving compounds against both natural outbreaks and bioterrorism.
"They know our number and they can call us 24 hours a day," said Brett Giroir, chief executive of Texas A&M Health Science Centre, site of one of the facilities. "We are prepared."
Global health agencies are only starting to consider whether to make experimental drugs, most of which have only been tested on monkeys, available to patients in West Africa, which is suffering the worst Ebola outbreak in history.
The World Health Organization is convening a group of bioethicists to consider such as issues as who decides which patients would receive the treatments or vaccines.
US officials have repeatedly emphasized the importance of public health measures such as quarantines to stop the spread of the disease.
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