GENEVA: World health experts will meet in Geneva on Friday for the second day of urgent talks on fast-tracking experimental Ebola drugs as doctors in the worst-hit countries pleaded to be given the serums.
With no fully tested treatments for Ebola, the World Health Organization has endorsed potential cures like ZMapp to be rushed out.
"Everybody keeps asking why isn't this medication made available to our people out there?" Samuel Kargbo, from Sierra Leone's ministry of health, told AFP.
ZMapp has been given to about 10 health workers who contracted the virus, including Americans and Europeans, three of whom recovered.
Its stocks have been exhausted, but WHO said a few hundred doses could potentially be ready by the end of the year.
"Our doctors who have been treating patients are also dying, and it's not made available," Kargbo said.
The two-day closed-door meeting of some 200 health experts in Geneva began on Thursday and is discussing eight potential therapies, including ZMapp, as well as two experimental vaccines.
"None are clinically proven," WHO stressed in a working document for the meeting, adding that "while extraordinary measures are now in place to accelerate the pace of clinical trials, new treatments or vaccines are not expected for widespread use before the end of 2014".
The agency warned that the death toll in the epidemic, which is centred on Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, was still growing fast.
"The outbreak is rising," WHO chief Margaret Chan told reporters in Washington on Wednesday, putting the death toll at "more than 1,900".
WHO on Thursday however put the official death toll a bit lower, at 1,841, out of a total of 3,685 cases in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Another seven people had died in Nigeria, which has counted a total of 22 cases, while one case has been confirmed in Senegal, WHO said.
"The current west African Ebola outbreak is unprecedented in size, complexity and the strain it has imposed on health systems," WHO said in a statement, acknowledging the "intense" public demand for a treatment.
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