Even doctors who were infected in west Africa and shipped back to the wealthy USA or Europe were given experimental medicines, because that is all there is. Other such diseases that kill and harm many more thousands also have no treatments or the drugs that exist are inadequate. Malaria, too, is neglected, because the drugs to treat it invariably run out of potency within a number of years. Ahead of the World Health Assembly which opens in Geneva on Monday, they are putting the case for special measures in a paper in the open-access journal PLoS Medicine. And if a strong R&D mechanism had been in place, “innovative vaccines and therapeutics could have been ready for testing earlier on in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.