News Brief by Samantha Fine
Health professionals and medical ethicists from
Africa, Europe and the United States of America insist on considering alternative trial designs for Ebola. Although
randomized controlled trials (RTC) provide immense amounts of data, Ebola’s
high mortality with current standard of care greatly indicates other methods
may be more useful. Leading health
experts propose that it could be beneficial to use studies without a placebo
control group. In the midst of the world’s worst Ebola epidemic in history, RTC
could stop using “gold standards” in order to test more innovative drugs that
could potentially offer survival benefits.
The Lancet. "Insisting only on randomized controlled trials for Ebola treatments unethical, impractical, say leading health experts." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 10 October 2014. .
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