With hundreds of patients in Africa suffering the devastating effects of Ebola, health experts are scrambling to determine which drugs might offer the best experimental treatment, and researchers are being pressed by government officials to speed up their work. Three treatments have shown especially promising results in monkeys, the researchers said. One, produced by tiny California biotech Mapp Biopharmaceutical, gained international prominence this week when it was given to two U.S. aid workers who contracted Ebola in West Africa and have since shown signs of improvement. Others are from Vancouver- based Tekmira Pharmaceuticals and privately-held Profectus BioSciences, of Tarrytown, NY. On Wednesday the World Health Organization said it would discuss next week the ethics of using Ebola drugs that have never been cleared for human use, wary of a long history of medicines being tested on people who were never properly informed of the risks. In the countries hardest hit by Ebola, suspicion of foreign medical workers is already widespread. But the health minister of Nigeria, Onyenbuchi Chukwu, told reporters this week that he had asked U.S. health officials about access to experimental Ebola therapies.U.S. drugmakers are fielding questions from government officials about their ability to supply treatments in sufficient quantities should the request come. "For years we've told the government you need to invest a little bit of money in this," said Profectus chief scientific officer John Eldridge. "And now it's, 'Oh my God, how fast can you make this?'" Officials at Mapp and Tekmira would not comment on efforts to make their treatments available in response to the outbreak.Speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, President Barack Obama said he lacks enough information to green-light Mapp's drug to treat the deadly Ebola virus and that the initial response should focus on public health measures to contain the outbreak. "We've got to let the science guide us, and I don't think all the information is in on whether this drug is helpful," the president said, adding that public health officials, in the course of containing the current outbreak, could assess whether new drugs or treatments can be effective. "We're focusing on the public health approach right now, but I will continue to seek information about what we're learning about these drugs going forward," he said.Dr. James Crowe, director of the Vaccine Center at Vanderbilt University who has been developing an Ebola treatment similar to Mapp's, said a Pentagon agency contacted him this week about his work and added he will meet next week with government scientists about accelerating his research. No Ebola drugs or vaccines have even entered mid-stage human trials, let alone been approved. The furthest along have been tested only in monkeys and a handful of humans.In a study with scientists at government biomedical research centers and the Pentagon, Profectus found that a single intramuscular injection protected all of the rhesus monkeys exposed to Ebola three weeks later. The company hopes to launch a human trial to assess the vaccine's safety within the next 12 months, Eldridge said.An experimental vaccine similar to Profectus's, developed by academic and government scientists, was rushed into emergency use only once. In 2009 a scientist in Germany working with Ebola-infected guinea pigs pricked her finger with a syringe containing the virus. The vaccine was flown from Canada, one of the sites where it was being developed.With greater financial support, scientists said, Ebola treatments could be ready for use sooner. For less than $10 million, said Vanderbilt's Crowe, four or five of the experimental drugs could be ready for testing within in four months. All of them seem to be effective only in a small window after exposure, however. "Nothing on planet Earth is going to work if somebody comes in with fullblown Ebola hemorrhagic fever and they are 24 hours or 72 hours from death," said Geisbert. "The damage has been done."