Liberia is facing an excruciating choice - deciding which handful of Ebola patients will receive an experimental drug that could prove either life-saving or life-threatening.
ZMapp, the untested Ebola drug, arrived in the West African country late yesterday.
Liberia's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Augustine Ngufuan, couriered the two boxes of Zmapp himself on a commercial flight from the U.S. to Monrovia, where it was unloaded at a VIP terminal.
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Precious cargo: Liberian Foreign Affairs Minister Augustine Ngafuan hand-carries boxes of the experimental, untested Ebola-fighting drug ZMapp on a Delta Airlines flight from New York's JFK airport to Monrovia
Important delivery: The drug will be taken to a hospital in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, and administered to Zukunis Ireland and Abraham Borbor, two Liberian doctors who caught Ebola virus while treating patients
An airport worker carries the Zmapp from the plane: With only around 10 to 12 doses of Zmapp available, and no knowledge about the drug's potential side effects, there are difficult ethical questions to be considered
The drug is unloaded: The doctors will be the first Africans to receive the treatment, though it has already been given to a Spanish priest who later died and two U.S. aid workers who are reportedly showing signs of recovery.
West Africa's Ebola virus outbreak has overwhelmed the region's already strained health systems and sparked an international debate over the ethics of giving drugs that have not yet been tested for safety or efficacy to the sick.
The charity group Doctors Without Borders, which is running many of the Ebola treatment centres and whose staff have tussled with whether to provide ZMapp, said such choices present 'an impossible dilemma'.
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