Ebola and the US patient spotlight global health 'injustice'
The story of the US doctor who survived Ebola with experimental treatment in Germany highlights wider inequities in global health. It also reveals how sharply
The story of the US doctor who survived Ebola with experimental treatment in Germany highlights wider inequities in global health. It also reveals how sharply medical standards can differ between African countries. "It was heartbreaking to see what was going on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, at the same time, to see how many resources can be mobilized to get this one patient from the DRC to Germany," said Thomas Cronen, a senior physician and infectious diseases expert in intensive care at the Charité — Berlin University Hospital. Cronen and his colleague Maximilian Gertler were in Nairobi, Kenya, when we spoke. They were there to exchange knowledge about treating Ebola with 50 clinicians from the eight member states of the East African Community (EAC). We had got onto the topic of the US-American missionary medic, Peter Stafford, who was evacuated from the DRC in mid-May for treatment at the Charité because, as the US government said at the time, Germany was closer than the US. Others speculated that the Trump administration refused to allow Stafford into the US, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio later promising to keep all cases of Ebola out of the country. Stafford had been helping people with Ebola in the DRC when he contracted the highly contagious and often-fatal disease. In Berlin, Stafford received an "experimental" treatment — experimental only in the sense that the drug, known as MBP-134, is still in clinical trials and has not been approved for human use. Reports at the time made it sound as though he could only have received the treatment outside of Africa. This was not strictly true. In an emergency meeting on May 15, 2026 — before Stafford's evacuation — the World Health Organization and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention had decided to prioritize two drugs for experimental treatment in the DRC Ebola outbreak, one of which was MBP-134.
What exactly is MBP-134? MBP-134 is a combination of two antibodies that were taken from a survivor of a West African Ebola outbreak that began in 2013. The antibodies in MBP-134 are reproduced in a lab and are, therefore, known as monoclonal antibodies (or mAbs). Monoclonal antibodies have been around since the 1980s. The first was approved as a drug to prevent kidney transplant rejection. However, it is only in the past 10 years that we've seen a growth in their use, from 30 approved mAbs in 2014 to about 144 approved mAbs by 2025. One of the most talked about uses of monoclonal antibodies is the drug lecanemab for Alzheimer's, a form of dementia. In that sense, mAbs offer many novel treatments in medicine. They are still not as widespread as they could be. In lab studies, MBP-134 has been tested on ferrets and cynomolgus monkeys, both of which survived infections with different Ebola-causing viruses, including Bundibugyo, which caused the 2026 DRC outbreak. It has also been tested in humans. So, MBP-134 was known to be a promising drug. But access to monoclonal antibodies in Africa is limited. "It takes more than a drug," said Gertler, an epidemiologist and tropical and emergency medicine expert, with years of experience in the field. "These medications require a certain level of clinical care, a setting where you can store them, where you can properly provide it to the patients, where you can monitor the medication," he said. The other drug deemed suitable for trial in the DRC outbreak was Remdesivir. Remdesivir is an antiviral originally developed as a potential treatment for hepatitis C and later tested against COVID-19 during the pandemic. The 'injustice is obvious' Cronen and Gertler saw a clear case of inequity between German or European hospitals and the conditions they knew in East Africa.
The BriefWire