Director Anthony Fauci of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), announced a trial of four possible Ebola drugs was stopped early because two of them had already shown considerable progress in treating the disease and they will focus their effort on those two drugs. This allows them to Ebola virus disease (EVD) is a hemorrhagic fever with a high mortality rate and spreads via human-to-human contact.

The PALM trial, for the Swahili phrase pamoja tulinde maisha or "together save lives," began last November and collected data from 499 patients from towns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has suffered an Ebola outbreak for roughly the past year. Professor Jean- Jacques Muyembe, Director General of the DRC's Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale that monitored the trial, said, "From now on, we will no longer say that Ebola is incurable." He went on to say thousands of deaths could be prevented.

While one experimental vaccine appears able to reduce Ebola mortality, up until now, no drugs have been clearly demonstrated suitable for treating existing infection. One antibody cocktail, ZMapp, initially showed promise in the field, but formal studies indicated it had less benefit than sought in preventing death. In the PALM trial, ZMapp served as a control, meaning scientists used it as a baseline and compared the three other treatments to it.

Mike Ryan of the World Health Organization (WHO) told the press the new drugs were only part of the solution: "What will stop Ebola, under professor Muyembe's leadership and that of the government of the DRC, is good surveillance, good infection prevention and control, good community engagement, excellent vaccinations, and the use of these therapeutics in the most effective way possible."

Past EVD outbreak mortality rates have been at least 25%, as high as 90%, and averaged around 50% according to WHO's statistics. According to Muyembe, many people do not seek treatment because they see their friends and relatives die after entering a care facility. "Now that 90% of their patients can go into the treatment center and come out completely cured," he told the press, "they will start believing it and building trust in the population and community"