--- title: Ebola: Experts to Discuss Testing Drugs as Crisis Deepens description: More than 100 scientists and experts will convene this week to agree on a game-plan for clinical trials of Ebola drugs. canonical: https://time.com/3261224/ebola-who-clinical-trials-drugs-zmapp/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-09-03T09:06:41.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:00:46.257Z article:section: Health og:title: WHO Calls Ebola Drug Summit og:description: More than 100 experts are meeting in response to a rapidly worsening epidemic og:url: https://time.com/3261224/ebola-who-clinical-trials-drugs-zmapp/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt272ab884721b90fd/6986a1bf06f2c11b173308a5/ebola1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4256 og:image:height: 2394 og:image:alt: LIBERIA-WAFRICA-HEALTH-EBOLA og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: WHO Calls Ebola Drug Summit twitter:description: More than 100 experts are meeting in response to a rapidly worsening epidemic twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt272ab884721b90fd/6986a1bf06f2c11b173308a5/ebola1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Desperate WHO Calls Ebola Drug Summit As Crisis Worsens > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's weekday health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free weekday newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=d8e986c4-82f7-4ee9-996a-2016f02df8d6&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola [Watch (HLS stream): Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/G194AmTC.m3u8) (2:32)  _Published 2014-08-13. Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola_ by [Elizabeth Barber](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) ## Elizabeth Barber Sep 3, 2014 9:06 AM UTC  Health care workers, wearing protective suits, leave a high-risk area at the French NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without borders) Elwa hospital in Monrovia, Liberia on Aug. 30, 2014. Health care workers, wearing protective suits, leave a high-risk area at the French NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without borders) Elwa hospital in Monrovia, Liberia on Aug. 30, 2014. Dominique Faget—AFP/Getty Images by [Elizabeth Barber](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) ## Elizabeth Barber Sep 3, 2014 9:06 AM UTC More than 100 scientists and industry executives will convene this week at the WHO’s headquarters Geneva, Switzerland, in response to a spiraling Ebola crisis. Their urgent mission will be to comb through the world’s stock of experimental Ebola drugs and vaccines and agree on a plan for clinical trials. The Sept. 4 to Sept. 5 meeting comes about a month after the WHO said that while it had a “moral duty” to conduct clinical trials, treating Ebola patients with drugs never previously tested on humans would be ethical given the severity of the crisis. Experimental Ebola drugs – though still wildcards – have been touted as [possible miracle workers](http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/09/02/status-of-new-drugs-to-fight-mutating-ebola-virus/) in the international fight to quell the outbreak, the worst on record. The epidemic has subsumed Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, and it has appeared in Nigeria, Senegal, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. ZMapp, one of the drugs before the WHO, cured all 18 monkeys that had been infected with Ebola as part of a [recent study](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/30/world/africa/study-says-zmapp-works-against-ebola-but-making-it-takes-time.html?ref=africa). Even so, anecdotal evidence of its effectiveness in humans is inconclusive: it has never been tested on humans but was given to seven Ebola patients, two of which have lived, and two of which have died. On Tuesday, U.S. health officials announced a [$25 million contract](http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/02/us-health-ebola-mapp-idUSKBN0GX26920140902) with ZMapp’s supplier, Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc., to begin testing the drug, as well as to jumpstart its production, as supplies are currently exhausted. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) will also begin [clinical trials](http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/guinea/qa-experimental-treatments.html) of an Ebola vaccine next week, and trials of additional vaccines are set for the fall. Meanwhile, the WHO announced last week that it has drafted a broad roadmap to “dramatically [scale up](http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2014/ebola-roadmap/en/) the international response” to the crisis and halt Ebola’s spread within six to nine months. Health workers have been highly critical of what they say is a lackluster international response to the emergency: after a U.N. meeting on Tuesday, Doctors without Boarders president Joanne Liu excoriated the leaders of unaffected nations for scrambling to secure their own borders against the virus, but failing to sending sufficient aid and experts into the crisis zones. “Six months into the worst Ebola epidemic in history, the world is [losing the battle](http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news-stories/speechopen-letter/united-nations-special-briefing-ebola) to contain it,” Liu said, calling on able countries to send bio-defense teams to West Africa. “We cannot cut off the affected countries and hope this epidemic will simply burn out. To put out this fire, we must run into the burning building.” Liu told the U.N. much of what has been done so far to stop the virus is not working. “Riots are breaking out,” she said. “Isolation centers are overwhelmed. Health workers on the front lines are becoming infected and are dying in shocking numbers. Others have fled in fear, leaving people without care for even the most common illnesses. Entire health systems have crumbled.” The U.N. meanwhile warned on Tuesday that the quarantines are expected to cause a food crisis in West Africa, as restrictions on movement in and out of afflicted communities are affecting food supplies, and as panic buying is jacking up the prices of ever-scare staples. More than 1,500 people have died in West Africa – almost half of the some 3,500 cases confirmed since the disease was identified in March. The WHO predicts that around 20,000 more people will fall ill with the virus before its spread can be stopped. ## Transcript This Ebola outbreak is unprecedented. This is definitely a marathon and not a sprint. The bugs have evolved. The outbreak has gotten bigger. We are only as strong as the weakest link, and we have learned from Ebola that West Africa was a very weak link. [ MUSIC ] There's small clinics, these are like one room places where sick people might go in their house with maybe an auxiliary nurse as some one who has a little bit of medical training, but defiantly not the same standards that we would have here in the US. We're facing 3 main threats. The first is the threat of new organisms. It was coming and spreading in different places. The second is drug- resistant bacteria, and the third are intentionally created organisms. What we do in an outbreak response is continuously see how can we make it better. The exercises we've gone through both, re- evaluating our own protocols but also understanding what the public and governmental responses are has really helped us understand. How to take care of these patients in the larger context of our healthcare systems. And, those who are in the building, I would urge you to come down to either the ops team room, or the, When designing a unit that is designed to accept patients with serious communicable diseases, like Ebola, there are ways to design a unit so that it's function. Functional. Any hospital that can isolate a patient in a single patient room with a bathroom and can follow our infection control recommendations is capable of safely caring for a patient with Ebola. And we've tried to encourage every single hospital in the country to have an antibiotic stewardship program to improve antibiotic prescribing practices. There is a concern about fatigue as we go on that, the CDC other groups have sort of ramping up now to try to surge resources into the area. What we're also realizing is, we need to be able to maintain that surge for many months to keep the pressure on to completely control the outbreak. Time will tell in the next few weeks if we can start to see those numbers going in the right direction. Fewer new cases each day or each week. The single most important thing to understand about protecting Americans from Ebola is that can best be done by stopping it at the source in Africa. Its normal to be scared of something as deadly as Ebola and for the general public I really hope we can never let our fear undermine our compassion. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3261224/ebola-who-clinical-trials-drugs-zmapp/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3261224/ebola-who-clinical-trials-drugs-zmapp/"},"headline":"Desperate WHO Calls Ebola Drug Summit As Crisis Worsens","datePublished":"2014-09-03T09:06:41.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T08:00:46.257Z","description":"The world urgently needs to find a drug that can fight Ebola","url":"https://time.com/3261224/ebola-who-clinical-trials-drugs-zmapp/","keywords":["Infectious Disease","Disease","United Nations","U.N.","Sierra Leone","doctors without borders","WHO","World Health Organization","ebola","Guinea","Liberia","Monrovia"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt272ab884721b90fd/6986a1bf06f2c11b173308a5/ebola1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Elizabeth Barber"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt272ab884721b90fd/6986a1bf06f2c11b173308a5/ebola1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"LIBERIA-WAFRICA-HEALTH-EBOLA","caption":"LIBERIA-WAFRICA-HEALTH-EBOLA","creditText":"Dominique Faget—AFP/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/infectious-disease/","name":"Infectious Disease"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3261224/ebola-who-clinical-trials-drugs-zmapp/","name":"Desperate WHO Calls Ebola Drug Summit As Crisis Worsens"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola","description":"Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/G194AmTC/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-08-13T23:41:12.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/G194AmTC.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3261224/ebola-who-clinical-trials-drugs-zmapp/","duration":"PT2M32S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3261224/ebola-who-clinical-trials-drugs-zmapp/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```