January 04, 2015 |

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by Dr. Jim Mercola

The most tweeted term in 2014 was “Ebola,” a highly infectious and lethal disease that’s been rapidly spreading in West Africa.

In October, I interviewed Dr. Robert Rowen, a leading expert on oxidative therapy, about an inexpensive and very safe treatment for this devastating disease.

At the time, he’d received an invitation by the President of Sierra Leone to bring his team there to teach health care workers how to treat Ebola using ozone.

Ozone is extraordinary in terms of its anti-infective and antiviral action, and it has virtually no toxicity, making it a prime candidate for both prevention and treatment of all sorts of infections and viral afflictions.

With bacteria, ozone works by puncturing the membrane of the bacteria, causing it to spill its contents and die. It also inactivates viruses, and does so 10 times faster than chlorine. This is in part why Dr. Rowen is convinced it can be a lifesaving treatment for Ebola patients.

Ozone is perhaps the most powerful natural oxidant in the world. It also has the advantage of stimulating the immune system, and modulating it—either up or down depending on what your system requires. In this follow-up interview, Dr. Rowen tells the story of what actually happened in Sierra Leone.

“Dr. Howard Robins and I traveled to Sierra Leone around the third week of October, and it was supported generously by donations from people who just came out of the blue, to donate money for materials.

The materials we had were syringes, needles, and butterfly needles. Longevity Resources Inc. from Canada donated 10 ozone machines. Royal Air Maroc got 37 boxes of cargo on our own plane; very kind of them to do that,” he says.

Unfortunately, although not unexpectedly, the use of this incredibly inexpensive therapy was undermined from the very start…

Teaching Health Care Workers in Sierra Leone

Once in Sierra Leone, Drs. Rowen and Robins were housed and looked after by Dr. Kojo Carew—a national hero during their blood diamonds era. The very first day, they were taken to a large meeting hall with about 100 or more people who were there to hear them speak.

The audience included some “extraordinarily skeptical doctors,” he notes, but by the time the lecture was over, most were willing to give ozone treatment a fair try. Conspicuously absent, however, was the Ministry of Health.

Over the next several days, Drs. Robins and Rowen trained many health care workers on how to administer Direct Intravenous Ozone Gas administration (DIV), and the Rowen-Robins protocol for Ebola, which involves a combination of supplements and timing of administration of DIV.

They also met with the President of Sierra Leone, who asked them to administer the treatment on him as well.

“I really admire him for that because here, he was putting himself in front of all of his people saying, ‘I’m willing to do this.’ And he did it. There was no problem,” Dr. Rowen says.

Minister of Health Pulls the Plug on Ozone Treatment…

Eventually, after many meetings, they finally met with Paolo Conte, the defense minister of Sierra Leone and newly appointed Ebola czar.

“After we told him the story, he had one question for us, ‘Why isn’t this being done already?’ We laughed and said, ‘We think you need to ask your other ministers why it hasn’t been done.’

We thought we had clearance now from their top brass. And the next day, we went to Hastings [the Sierra Leone government’s Ebola treatment center] and started training all of their staff how to do [ozone therapy]…

In the middle of training, a call comes in from the assistant minister of health, telling the military Major in charge of the facility, ‘If you value your job, there will be no ozone at Hastings…‘

Shortly after that, a call came in from the minister of health himself, reaffirming [the order]. I’m a fairly calm person under most situations. I’m slow to anger, but I exploded. In full view of everybody there, their whole staff; I just came unglued.

I went to the Major and said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, this is an illegal order. I told the entire staff, ‘You’re all at risk; some of you are going to die, [and] you’re the President’s top priority.'”

Two Doctors Recover from Ebola—Was it Due to Ozone Therapy?

One of the doctors trained in the use of ozone therapy at Hastings named Dr. Kanneh, accidentally stuck himself with an Ebola infected needle, and developed typical Ebola symptoms within three days, as expected. Understandably, he was scared to death to get tested, because he knew if he tested positive, he would not be allowed to receive ozone treatment. He did take ozone, as per Rowen-Robins protocol, and was symptom-free within 48 hours.

“First of all, if you’re suspected of having Ebola, you’re thrown into a room with every other person who’s suspected. And if you didn’t have Ebola beforehand, you’re probably going to have Ebola afterwards,” Dr. Rowen notes.

“If you do test positive for Ebola, you’re picked up forcibly in a paddy wagon and you’re carted off to the ‘treatment center.’ Treatment center? Well, I’m finding out now that the people aren’t really fed. If their families don’t feed them, they don’t get fed. At best, you’re going to get IV fluids…

They have a 60 percent probability of dying. And in the case of doctors… 100 percent of Sierra Leonean doctors who have gotten Ebola have died, with the exception of two. The first one is Dr. Kanneh. Now, we cannot prove that he had Ebola because he wasn’t tested. I certainly now understand why he didn’t get tested; he knew he would be carted off and left to die…”

The second survivor is Dr. Komba Songu Mbriwa, who did test positive for the virus. Somehow he was offered, and accepted, ozone therapy, which was administered by Dr. Kanneh. Four days later, the government announced Dr. Mbriwa was free of Ebola… It’s still unclear what or who allowed Dr. Mbriwa to receive the treatment, while it was withheld from so many others—including other infected doctors.

“I’m not really sure how it got there or if they looked the other way because he was a military physician,” Dr. Rowen says. “But even though he was treated with ozone, the government didn’t acknowledge it publicly. In fact, while they publicly said, ‘We now have the Sierra Leonean physician who’s survived Ebola,’ they didn’t tell the world that he got ozone.

The government itself, apparently, took the credit for it. Now, I said ‘apparently’ because I don’t know everything that happened there. All I know is, there’s been no mention that the man received ozone at all, and we know he did receive it, and we know that he’s the only confirmed physician case of a Sierra Leone doctor to have made [survived] it.”

… [Another] doctor we trained at Hastings, whom I met, also got Ebola… He asked for ozone; he begged for ozone, and was refused. He was transferred from Hastings, where it could’ve been accessible, to another center where it wasn’t accessible, and then he got renal failure, and he was transferred again for dialysis, and died. This is a man that I met and that I had hands-on training with, and my heart is broken because he was refused ozone after he asked for it.”