Ebola Experts. What Experts?

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR” Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huck Finn.

After months venturing into an aspect of medicine totally unknown to them, on April 17, 2015, the husband and wife team and founders of Italian NGO, Emergency, finally got the recognition they had longed for - being declared experts (on Ebola). At least that’s the impression created by a petition they, jointly with others, filed seeking for relaxed protocols governing clinical trials.

The petitioners have threatened dire consequences for the world if the rules are not relaxed, pronto. Missing from the paper that was published by sciencedaily.com under the banner of The Lancet Infectious Diseases, is the doctors' disregard for centuries-old medical ethics.

Dr. Gino Strada, an Italian top surgeon now smoking his way around Goderich while collecting fundraising photos of victims for his organisation's Facebook page

The so-called experts are trying to overturn randomisation in clinical trials, an idea that was first proposed in the seventeenth century by Belgian scientist, John Baptista van Helmont [ironically the drug Amaldarone, which the pair has been administering unethically in West Africa, was invented by another Belgian - editor].

But to whose benefit is the couple seeking the relaxation? For self-glory or for the greater good of humanity? Is exterminating a few helpless people while conducting unregulated trials the norm in some circles?

Supposing the rules, guides and ethics for Ebola medication trials were made lenient today, what would stop other scientists (or quacks) from seeking similar treatment for their own trials on human subjects?

The duo’s activities in Sierra Leone are nowhere close to clinical trials. Going by the testimonies in our possession, the NGO’s ‘trials’ are plain laboratory work but with humans as subjects.

These are extracts from collaborated narratives provided independently by various health workers who had the misfortune of working under Portella and Strada in Sierra Leone. [We have deliberately omitted some information that would clearly identify individual sources - editor]

• Emergency authorised a specialist anesthetist to head a medical intervention. Consequently patients were unnecessarily put on sedatives, ventilators and incubators, leading to some premature deaths.
• Two anesthetists, [identities known to us] regularly failed to find the patients’ veins causing hematoma and deaths. One anesthetist is reported to have loudly confessed that she would opt to gas patients than cause more deaths.
• The unwarranted death of Emanuel due to an overdose of anesthetics could mean there’s likely a drum full of worms in Emergency’s cabinet.
• Emergency didn’t follow the basics of medical treatment. They failed to maintain clinical and treatment records for every patient – this led to massive overdose of patients, as members of the in-coming shift would not necessarily know what medications had already been administered.
• Lack of proper treatment sheets led to cases of patients who were negative for Ebola being erroneously wheeled into the Red Zone without protective suits. Upon realisation of the errors, the team would simply return the patients to the unaffected population – lucky Ebola isn’t airborne.
• There is no direct communication with patients at the Goderich Centre. While this could be blamed on language barriers, the failure to communicate with patients has led to numerous cases of misdiagnosis. One such instance was where a patient with a swollen scrotum was given multiple doses of antibiotics after the Emergency team wrongly concluded the swelling was related to Ebola. Only when the patient was being discharged did a medic find out that the swelling began eight years following an accident involving building stones - he worked at a stone crashing site.
• Patients with active tuberculosis (TB) were generally mixed with other suspected Ebola cases at an enclosed holding tent, despite the known infectious nature of TB
• Degradation of patients: Emergency team disregarded one of the most basic needs - privacy. They put seriously ill male and female patients together. They would defecate, vomit and even die next to strangers of the opposite genders. [if it is normal to mix genders like this, then why do washrooms have male and female sections? – editor]
• Overdose: Drugs such as antibiotics would be administered without any reference to the clinically accepted dosage. Cases of high blood pressure medication, Adalat, being administered more than once a day was routine.
• Other than the overdose, the haphazard administration of drugs with little regard to their contraindication was fatal. For instance, a patient already on Amiodarone would be given multiple antibiotics and high blood pressure medication, Lasix, which is strictly warned especially on patients with low potassium levels. From the information we have gathered, not even a General Practitioner would make such fundamental medical errors.

Grabbed from Emergency's Facebook page. The victims' consents were never obtained

• The ICU operated by Emergency had extremely low temperature for the sole benefit of foreign medics who found the tropical temperatures too high. The general feeling was, rather patients on life support freeze due to the Air Condition’s low temperatures than have health workers exposed to highs of 21-or-22 degrees centigrade.
• Gina Portella is known to scream and shout within the center, including the Red Zone. Her ranting often made the staff nervous. One medic confessed she spent a lot of energy plotting “how not to meet with Gina…” This could have contributed to the high infection rates among staff. [According to information we unearthed, Emergency has the highest staff infection rate among the NGOs operating in Ebola zones in West Africa. A certain Greek proverb comes to mind; "As empty vessels make the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest blabbers," editor]
• Emergency‘s management, more specifically the NGO’s CEO Dr. Gino Strada, secretly took photographs of helpless patients to post on the organisation’s Facebook page.
• In reference to WHO’s Resolution WHA31.56 and WHA33.35 on the health hazards of tobacco smoking, it was disturbing to learn that Emergency allowed health workers to smoke anywhere at the Goderich treatment centre. This relaxation of smoking rules seemed to have been designed to suit Dr. Strada, who reportedly suffers from emphysema (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) due to heavy smoking. The issue of secondary cigarette smoke never worried the team.
• While these untested and unproven drugs were being given to Ebola patients, we have learnt that Emergency had received stock of the reportedly more effective ZMapp, but kept it exclusively for their staff. When one European health worker got affected, Emergency reported filed a claim of Euros 180,000 with the insurance company for a dose of ZMapp. [If our investigation on this matter prove the claims to be true, then it would be a clear case of insurance fraud - editor] 

It would be appropriate to conclude that Gina Portella, tired of living in the shadow of her surgeon husband, finally found an opportunity to make a name for herself in the medical world. The Sierra Leonean Ebola patients seemed the perfect tools for her mission.

Have we heard the last on this sorry saga? Not by a very long shot.