News: Dying Africans Are Pleading For The Ebola Drug Given To Two Americans

A Nigerian health official waits to screen passengers at an airport.

No one knows how to cure the Ebola virus.
But speculation about the experimental treatment/serum that was given to two Ebola-infected US citizens, along with panic over Ebola — unwarranted in the United States, more logical in West Africa — has people questioning why something that many have said may have cured the two Americans was given only to them, while the African body count continues to climb.
"This is something that has made our job most difficult," Tolbert Nyenswah, Liberia's assistant health minister, told the Wall Street Journal. "The population here is asking: 'You said there was no cure for Ebola, but the Americans are curing it?'"
Many have the same question.

So the secret serum used to cure 2 Americans from Ebola is too secret to reach Africans dying like flies? #JustAsking
— Dr Sheik Umar Khan (@MrBasabose) August 5, 2014

wait so let me understand they've had this 'secret' serum to save two Americans while hundreds of Africans are dying? http://t.co/dLyLfal4z5
— Amina Doherty (@sheroxlox) August 5, 2014

A desperate situation and fascination with the idea of a cure, especially one that has been cast as "secret" — it's merely experimental and unapproved — has obscured the fact that we don't know that the treatment Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol received actually did anything for them. While Ebola is highly fatal, some people do survive without any extraordinary interventions.
The supportive medical care that they received — and had access to, unlike many Africans suffering from the disease — may have had just as much to do with the fact that their condition is reportedly improving.
It's important to note that the treatment had not been tested on humans ever before. Larry Zeitlin, the president of Mapp Biopharmaceuticals, the company that developed the treatment, told Business Insider that the results of studies on the therapy have not even been published yet.
A treatment that's never been tested on humans might only not work, it could potentially have fatal side effects — which is why Writebol and Brantly had to provide consent saying they understood the risks of being injected with an unknown drug.