"I am going to die"

[Bob Of Burleson]

The Recovering Americans and the 'Top Secret' Ebola drug
Two U.S. doctors with Ebola have improved after receiving an experimental antibody.

James Hamblin
The Atlantic

Because Kent Brantly is a physician who has watched people die of Ebola, there was an especially chilling prescience to his assessment last week, between labored breaths: "I am going to die."

His condition was grave. But then on Saturday, we saw images of Brantly's heroic return to U.S. soil, walking with minimal assistance from an ambulance into an isolation unit at Emory University Hospital.

"One of the doctors called it 'miraculous,'" Dr. Sanjay Gupta reported from Emory this morning, of Brantly's turnaround within hours of receiving a treatment delivered from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. "Not a term we scientists like to throw around."

"The outbreak is moving faster than our efforts to control it," Dr. Margaret Chan, director of the World Health Organization, said on Friday in a plea for international help containing the virus. "If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences can be catastrophic in terms of lost lives, but also severe socioeconomic disruption and a high risk of spread to other countries."

In that light, and because Ebola is notoriously incurable (and the strain at large its most lethal), it is overwhelming to hear that "Secret Serum Likely Saved Ebola Patients," as we do this morning from Gupta's every-20-minute CNN reports. He writes:

"Three top secret, experimental vials stored at subzero temperatures were flown into Liberia last week in a last-ditch effort to save two American missionary workers (Drs. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol) who had contracted Ebola, according to a source familiar with details of the treatment."

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