EBOLA plague 2014-15-16-17...

[Psalm 51:17]

http://news.msn.com/world/sierra-leone-to-have-lockdown-amid-ebola-crisis
Sierra Leone to have lockdown amid Ebola crisis
9/6/14

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) — Authorities are ordering people in Sierra Leone to stay inside their homes for three days later this month as part of an effort to stop the spread of Ebola, which has killed more than 2,000 people across West Africa, a government spokesman said Saturday.

Abdulai Bayraytay said the government is telling people to stay inside their homes on Sept. 19, 20 and 21. The dates were chosen to give people enough time to stock up on food and other provisions before the ban on movement goes into effect, he said.

Already though some are questioning whether the measure will help. Doctors Without Borders says it "will be extremely difficult for health workers to accurately identify cases through door-to-door screening."

Even if suspected cases are identified during the lockdown, the group says Sierra Leone doesn't have enough beds for them.

"Without a place to take suspected cases — to screen and treat them — the approach cannot work," the group said Saturday. "It has been our experience that lockdowns and quarantines do not help control Ebola as they end up driving people underground and jeopardizing the trust between people and health providers. This leads to the concealment of potential cases and ends up spreading the disease further."

Ebola has killed more than 2,000 people across West Africa, including more than 400 deaths in Sierra Leone.

A physician said Friday that health care in the capital city of Freetown has "crumbled" because many people were terrified to go to hospitals and some doctors are wary of treating those who do show up.

Speaking at the launch of a public education program in Freetown, Kwame O'Neil said patients suffering from all kinds of ailments are dying for lack of treatment because of these fears.

One young girl died of appendicitis when, after showing up at a hospital, a doctor there denied he was a doctor and refused to treat her, O'Neil said.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-surging-places-had-beaten-back-090604110.html
Ebola is surging in places it had been beaten back
9/8/14

CONAKRY, Guinea (AP) — Doctors Without Borders shuttered one of its Ebola treatment centers in Guinea in May. They thought the deadly virus was being contained there.

The Macenta region, right on the Liberian border, had been one of the first places where the outbreak surfaced, but they hadn't seen a new case for weeks. So they packed up, leaving a handful of staff on stand-by. The outbreak was showing signs of slowing elsewhere as well.

Instead, new cases appeared across the border in Liberia and then spread across West Africa, carried by the sick and dying. Now, months later, Macenta is once again a hotspot.

The resurgence of the disease in a place where doctors thought they had it beat shows how history's largest Ebola outbreak has spun out of control.

It began with people leaving homes in Liberia to seek better care or reunite with families back in Guinea, a pattern repeating itself all over.

"Currently in Guinea, all the new cases, all the new epidemic, are linked to people that are coming back from Liberia or from Sierra Leone," said Marc Poncin, the emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Guinea.

The epidemic also has touched Nigeria and Senegal while killing more than 2,000 people across West Africa. Never before has the disease struck such a densely populated region, where so many people are on the move. For four decades, the virus struck in relatively remote areas, where doctors could quickly isolate communities and stop its spread.

In previous outbreaks, a cleared pocket like Macenta would be easy to keep clear.

This time, the virus is traveling effortlessly across borders by plane, car and foot, shifting from forests to cities and springing up in clusters far from any previously known infections. Border closures, flight bans and mass quarantines have been ineffective.

"Everything we do is too small and too late," said Poncin. "We're always running after the epidemic."

Ebola has been able to follow its own course because West Africa lacks the health care workers it needs to monitor potential carriers and train communities in how to avoid catching the disease. People in contact with the sick have evaded surveillance, moving at will and hiding their illnesses until they infect others in turn. Whole villages, stricken by fear, have repeatedly shut themselves off for days or weeks, giving the virus more opportunities to whip around and skip someplace else.

Dr. Peter Piot, who co-discovered Ebola, said Ebola isn't striking in a "linear fashion" this time. It's hopping around, especially in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

"The epidemic is now so vast and so extensive that one should consider that in the three (hardest-hit) countries, everybody is now at risk and it won't be over until the last case has survived and six weeks have passed," said Piot, who runs London's School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

In mid-August, Guinea's health ministry announced 30 new cases in the Macenta region, the first recorded in months. Many were Guinean citizens who had been living in Liberia and were therefore allowed to return through closed border crossings. These returnees infected their families and neighbors, and so now there is active transmission in Macenta, said Michael Kinzer, who has led the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's team in Guinea in recent weeks.

Doctors Without Borders has returned to Macenta as well, opening a transit center more than a week ago at the site of its old clinic where it screens patients. As of the beginning of this month, the Health Ministry said 45 people from Macenta were being treated at an expanded treatment center at Gueckedou. The charity would like to open treatment centers in both towns, but it does not have enough staff.

Authorities are now restricting access to the region's main city, also called Macenta, where fear has again taken hold.

"I have the impression that time has stopped in Macenta, that the city has shrunk," said Siniman Kouroumah, a 42-year-old teacher. "We are afraid to walk the city, to eat anywhere, to drink anywhere."

Poncin said he, too, has felt a shift, but for the better: People in Macenta are now afraid of dead bodies, running away from them rather than scooping them up for traditional burials. Villagers who used to throw stones at the health workers tracing contacts now seek their help.

Communities in many parts of Guinea are Ebola-free now, said Dr. Tom Frieden, the CDC's director, said on a recent visit to Guinea. "The challenge is that the region is really one entity, and it's so important that we get it right in all places."

"This is really the first epidemic of Ebola the world has ever known," Frieden said. "By epidemic what we mean is it's spreading widely through society, but not spreading through new ways according to everything we know. It's spreading from just two roots: people caring for other people in hospitals or homes, and unsafe burial practices where people may come in contact with body fluids of someone who has died from Ebola."

Getting it right in all places requires simultaneously imposing the same three measures anywhere Ebola appears, Poncin said: isolating the sick, tracing and monitoring everyone they have come into contact with, and ensuring infected bodies are buried safely.

Guinea is doing this fairly well, but Sierra Leone isn't doing enough, and Liberia is barely doing any contact-tracing, Poncin said.

That means officials don't know where people are at risk, making it almost impossible to prevent or at least contain new cases. The World Health Organization says it believes that the true spread in hard-hit areas may be two or four times bigger than what's known.

And if Liberia and Sierra Leone aren't keeping up, the public health work in Guinea — and Nigeria and Senegal — is for naught.

"As long there is one case of Ebola virus disease anywhere in the world and people are allowed to travel," Nigeria's health minister, Onyebuchi Chukwu, said recently, "every country in the world remains at risk."

[Psalm 51:17]

http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-spread-exponential-liberia-thousands-cases-expected-september-161927694.html
Ebola spread exponential in Liberia, thousands of cases expected in September: WHO
9/8/14

GENEVA (Reuters) - The Ebola virus is spreading exponentially in Liberia, where many thousands of new cases expected over the coming three weeks, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

In a statement, the WHO said that motorbike-taxis and regular taxis are "a hot source of potential virus transmission" in Liberia where conventional Ebola control interventions "are not having an adequate impact".

The United Nations agency said that aid partners need to scale-up current efforts against Ebola by three-to-four fold in Liberia and elsewhere in West Africa. In Liberia it had killed 1,089 people among 1,871 cases, according to the WHO's update of last Friday.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://news.yahoo.com/doctor-ebola-better-tolerating-treatment-193603423.html
4th American with Ebola to be flown to US for care
9/8/14

ATLANTA (AP) — A fourth American who contracted Ebola in West Africa was expected to arrive in the U.S. for care Tuesday and will be treated at an Atlanta hospital where two other aid workers successfully recovered from the disease, the hospital said Monday.

Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. James Wilson said the patient, as in past cases, would be flown into Dobbins Air Reserve Base outside Atlanta. Emory University Hospital said in a news release that the patient would be treated in its isolation unit but cited confidentiality in not releasing more information about the person.

The World Health Organization, however, said one of its doctors who has been working in an Ebola treatment center in Sierra Leone has tested positive for the disease. It said the doctor was in stable condition Monday in Freetown and will be evacuated. The State Department said the doctor was from the U.S.

Last month, two aid workers who contracted Ebola while working in Liberia were treated successfully at Emory. A third patient, an American doctor, who is being treated in Nebraska, appeared to be better tolerating his experimental treatments Monday, but his recovery remains uncertain.

The family of Dr. Rick Sacra said he was able to eat breakfast Monday for the first time since arriving Friday at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

The 51-year-old remains in stable condition. But his wife, Debbie, said Sacra is more alert and that they had a half-hour conversation by video conference Sunday.

"He hasn't been able to eat much since he got here, but he had some toast and apple sauce," Debbie Sacra said. "He also tolerated the research drug well — better than he had the previous doses he was given."

Rick Sacra, a doctor from Worcester, Massachusetts, spent 15 years working at the Liberia hospital where he fell ill. He was practicing family medicine in Liberia with the North Carolina-based charity SIM.

Authorities say roughly 2,100 people have died during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, but Ebola hasn't been confirmed as the cause of all those deaths.

Sacra is being treated with an experimental drug that is different than the one given to the two Americans treated for Ebola at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, who also work for SIM, have recovered.

Sacra came to Omaha instead of Atlanta because federal officials asked the medical center to treat him in order to prepare other isolation units to take more Ebola patients if needed.

Sacra's doctors have refused to name the drug they are using, but they say they've been consulting with experts on Ebola on his treatment.

Dr. Aneesh Mehta of Emory University said Monday that it was impossible to know if the experimental ZMapp they received worked.

But Mehta said Emory doctors have been advising other physicians that some particular types of supportive care did seem to help. Those included switching between different types of IV fluids to meet each patient's specific electrolyte needs at the time. And giving high-quality liquid nutrition to boost their levels of protein and other nutrients "to help build back that immune system that was under attack."

Mehta and other experts were discussing Ebola at the American Society for Microbiology meeting Monday.

Pharmaceutical companies are developing vaccines for Ebola and drugs to help treat the virus, but they're not fully tested or readily available yet.

Dr. Gary Kobinger of the Public Health Agency of Canada helped pioneer the research that led to ZMapp, and he said the U.S. manufacturer appears to be on track for a Phase 1 safety study early next year, perhaps as early as January, although no drug is available currently.

On the vaccine front, Kobinger said a Canadian-made candidate should be starting Phase 1 trials within weeks.

WHO has suggested turning to the blood of Ebola survivors as an experimental treatment, and Sacra's doctors have said they are considering that.

[Psalm 51:17]

Video: https://screen.yahoo.com/possible-ebola-case-miami-202108092.html
POSSIBLE EBOLA CASE IN MIAMI

[Mark]

Ebola Spreading 'Exponentially' as Patients Seek Beds in Liberia

The Ebola virus is spreading exponentially across Liberia as patients fill taxis in a fruitless search for medical care, the World Health Organization said Monday.

In Sierra Leone, a doctor working for WHO tested positive and was preparing to be evacuated from the country. Meanwhile, the newest U.S. patient, a doctor infected in Liberia, was feeling a little better and could even eat a little, doctors treating him in Nebraska said.

The various reports illustrated in the clearest possible way the disparities driving the epidemic in West Africa, where there’s almost no medical system structure. The three patients evacuated to the United States have all begun to recover quickly once they get good supportive care, which includes around-the-clock nursing care and good nutrition.

WHO and other groups have been warning that the situation in Liberia and Sierra Leone and Guinea is dire. It’s especially bad in Liberia, WHO said Monday.

“Transmission of the Ebola virus in Liberia is already intense and the number of new cases is increasing exponentially,” WHO said in a statement.

    "No free beds for Ebola treatment exist anywhere in the country.”

“In Monrovia, taxis filled with entire families, of whom some members are thought to be infected with the Ebola virus, crisscross the city, searching for a treatment bed. There are none. As WHO staff in Liberia confirm, no free beds for Ebola treatment exist anywhere in the country.”

For example, in Montserrado county, 1,000 beds are urgently needed but only 240 beds are available. WHO has said more than 3,600 people have been infected with Ebola in this West African epidemic, and 2,000 have died, but the organization predicts as many as 20,000 will be sickened before it’s over. Half of those infected have been dying.

“According to a WHO staff member who has been in Liberia for the past several weeks, motorbike-taxis and regular taxis are a hot source of potential Ebola virus transmission, as these vehicles are not disinfected at all, much less before new passengers are taken on board,” WHO said.

“When patients are turned away at Ebola treatment centers, they have no choice but to return to their communities and homes, where they inevitably infect others, perpetuating constantly higher flare-ups in the number of cases.”

The need for beds, supplies and staff have “completely outstripped” capacity, both of the Liberia government and of outside groups such as Who and Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) to help.

Healthcare workers are being especially hard hit. “Some 152 health care workers have been infected and 79 have died,” WHO said. When the outbreak began, Liberia had only one doctor to treat nearly 100,000 people in a total population of 4.4 million people. Every infection or death of a doctor or nurse depletes response capacity significantly.”

    "Motorbike-taxis and regular taxis are a hot source of potential Ebola virus transmission."

One WHO doctor in Sierra Leone is sick and will be sent out of the country for treatment, WHO said, but declined to say where the doctor was from.

Three of the healthcare workers affected were American medical missionaries working for the groups Samaritan’s Purse and SIM USA in Monrovia. All three were evacuated to the U.S. Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol have recovered, while Dr. Rick Sacra is being treated at the University of Nebraska’s special biocontainment unit.

Debbie Sacra said her husband, a 51-year-old family physician, was eating and listening to music while he receives an experimental drug.

“He had some breakfast this morning, which is a change,” Debbie Sacra said in a statement. “He hasn’t been able to eat much since he got here, but he had some toast and apple sauce. He also tolerated the research drug well — better than he had the previous doses he was given.”

The hospital hasn’t said what treatment Sacra is receiving. Brantly and Writebol each received one treatment course of ZMapp, an experimental drug made by Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc, but doctors stress they cannot tell if it helped.

“It’s hard to derive a lot of meaningful data from the care of just two patients,” said Dr. Aneesh Mehta, one of the medical team at Emory University Hospital who treated Brantly and Writebol. High quality nutrition given intravenously may have helped, Mehta said, as did carefully balanced fluid replacement formulas. Ebola patients often suffer intense vomiting and diarrhea.

The epidemic has demonstrated “how one disease outbreak can cause a whole country to go into crisis,” said Dr. Barbara Knust, team leader for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Ebola response.

“The Ebola outbreak has just driven home the inadequacy that’s there,” Knust told an American Society for Microbiology meeting.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/ebola-spreading-exponentially-patients-seek-beds-liberia-n198516

[Psalm 51:17]

http://news.yahoo.com/us-ebola-evacuations-has-included-more-patients--air-ambulance-operator-says-160126831.html
9/9/14

Ebola evacuations to US greater than previously known
Transports have included patients exposed to virus, air ambulance operator says

An undisclosed number of people who’ve been exposed to the Ebola virus — not just the four patients publicly identified with diagnosed cases — have been evacuated to the U.S. by an air ambulance company contracted by the State Department.

“We moved a lot of other people who had an exposure event,” said Dent Thompson, vice president of Phoenix Air Group. “Many times these people are just fine, they just had an exposure. But you have to treat it as though the disease is present.”

How many exposed patients have been flown from West Africa to the U.S.? Thompson said medical privacy laws and his company’s contract with the State Department prevent him from revealing the figure.

“I’m not avoiding it,” Thompson told Yahoo News. “I’m just not allowed to talk about it.”

Five weeks ago, medical missionary Dr. Kent Brantly became the first Ebola patient to be treated in the U.S. He and fellow missionary Nancy Writebol were nursed back to health in a special isolation unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta and later released. Dr. Rick Sacra and an unidentified doctor who arrived on Tuesday are currently being treated in the U.S.

The State Department confirmed the four known Ebola patient transports but couldn’t provide details on any exposure evacuations to the United States. Phoenix Air, they said, is under contract because of its expertise.

An unnamed State Department official said “every precaution is taken to move the patient safely and securely, to provide critical care en route, and to maintain strict isolation upon arrival in the United States.”

Thompson said Phoenix Air has flown 10 Ebola-related missions in the past six weeks.

“Not everything we do is [related to] a sick person,” he said, adding that the company has also flown supplies. “We do basically whatever needs to be done.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is operating an around-the-clock Ebola emergency operations center, did not immediately respond to an email seeking information about the exposure patient transports.

On Monday, President Barack Obama, who has called the outbreak a U.S. national security priority, pledged more U.S. assistance to West Africa. The White House recently requested $30 million more from Congress to help the CDC’s efforts with the crisis.

With multiple government and aid organizations trying to tackle the unprecedented epidemic, Thompson predicts his team will be flying more precautionary patients back to the U.S.

“There will be a certain number of people who, through no fault of their own, will have an exposure event, and they are immediately identified and immediately extracted,” he said.

Phoenix Air’s modified Gulfstream III jets are “literally intensive care units with wings,” Thompson said. He said even evacuees without a confirmed Ebola diagnosis are placed in an isolation chamber for the 12- to 14-hour flight from West Africa to the U.S.

“You can never, ever let your safety guards down,” he said.

The Georgia-based air transport company got involved in the latest Ebola crisis when the Christian humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse recruited it to evacuate Brantly and Writebol. The State Department was involved in the logistics, but the trips were funded by Samaritan’s Purse.

Since then, Thompson said, Phoenix Air has solely been under contract with the State Department.

“It became evident that we could no longer treat any of these flights as a private or commercial flight,” said Thompson, declining to divulge the specifics of the government contract.

Brantly, Writebol and the latest patient have been treated at Emory University in Atlanta. Last week, Sacra was flown to the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. Those hospitals, plus the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula, Montana, have specially-equipped biocontainment units built in collaboration with the CDC. However, the CDC has said any U.S. hospital following infection control recommendations and isolating a patient in a private room is capable of safely managing an infected patient.

Thompson declined to say where patients who have just been exposed to Ebola have been flown to in the U.S.

“They all go to a hospital and they monitor them,” he said. “If they do develop it, then they treat them. And, fingers crossed, they’re going to walk out the way Brantly and Nancy Writebol walked out.”

[Psalm 51:17]

Video: https://screen.yahoo.com/possible-ebola-case-miami-202108092.html
POSSIBLE EBOLA CASE IN MIAMI

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/09/08/a-miami-patient-has-tested-negative-for-ebola
A Miami patient has tested negative for Ebola
9/8/14

A patient in Miami who was suspected of contracting Ebola has tested negative for the virus, a Florida hospital system said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will conduct additional testing to confirm the result, a spokesman said on a conference call Monday, but the patient is considered to be a "low risk."

"Last week, a Jackson Health System patient tested negative for the Ebola virus," Matthew Pinzur, a spokesman for the health system said in a statement. "The patient had shown some symptoms associated with the disease and was tested in an abundance of caution. All of our community's precautionary measures were taken, multiple agencies worked effectively in partnership, and we demonstrated that we are ready in the unlikely event that this disease is detected in Miami-Dade County."

It was just the latest in a series of false alarms in the United States since the Ebola epidemic began to ravage several countries in West Africa. Possible Ebola patients who were tested in New York, California and New Mexico all tested negative for the deadly virus.

more

[Psalm 51:17]

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/09/09/ebola-infected-patient-to-be-brought-from-west-africa-to-atlanta-hospital/
9/9/14
Atlanta hospital receives its third American Ebola patient

The fourth American aid worker sickened with the Ebola virus arrived Tuesday morning to a mostly calm scene at Emory University Hospital, where two others had been successfully treated.

An ambulance carrying the patient arrived about 10:25 a.m., with a police escort. Wearing a bulky protective suit similar to those of Emory's first two arrivals, the patient walked from the ambulance to the hospital.

About an hour earlier, the specially equipped plane carrying the patient touched down at Dobbins Air Reserve Base, located northwest of Atlanta.

"Just as we did in three previous cases, every precaution was taken to move the patient safely and securely, to provide critical care en route, and to maintain strict isolation upon arrival in the United States," said Marie Harf, State Department Deputy Spokesperson.

Emory University Hospital said the patient, whose identity and status remain confidential, will be treated in the isolation unit previously used by the other two patients. The World Health Organization (WHO) would only confirm that a doctor who had been working in an Ebola treatment center in Sierra Leone tested positive for the disease. The State Department later confirmed the doctor was from the U.S.

At a news conference, Dr. Aneesh Mehta said the patient's ability to walk from the ambulance was a good sign, but not the only one the hospital must consider.

"We will evaluate all options, and with the patient make a decision about what avenues we explore," Mehta, an infections disease expert at Emory, said. "We have protocols in place.”

The special isolation unit that will house the patient can hold up to three people, and that capacity could be increased if needed, Mehta said.

Last month, two U.S. aid workers who contracted Ebola in Liberia, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, were treated successfully at Emory.

"We were comfortable taking care of these patients," Mehta said. "We understand that there was fear out there but we hope that in our ability to communicate our processes and educate the public that that fear is being diminished.”

Another aid worker, Dr. Rick Sacra, 51, of Worcester, Massachusetts, is being treated at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. He arrived Friday and is in stable condition. Sacra was practicing family medicine in Liberia with the North Carolina-based charity SIM, with whom Writebol also worked.

"He hasn't be able to eat much since he got here, but he had some toast and applesauce," Debbie Sacra, his wife, said Tuesday. "He also tolerated the research drug well -- better than he had the previous doses he was given.”

Federal officials say they asked the Nebraska hospital to treat him instead of Emory in order to prepare other isolation units for more Ebola patients if needed.

The Ebola outbreak sweeping West Africa has killed more than 2,200 people and has taken a particularly high toll on health care workers. More than 4,200 people have believed to have been sickened in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal.

Dr. Daniel Bausch, a tropical disease expert and associate professor at Tulane University said the outbreak is causing a "tense, difficult situation in West Africa."

"There are not enough health workers," Bausch said, adding that the Ebola center where the latest American patient contracted the disease is "struggling to get the amount of staff it needs."

"There is not the degree of safety we'd like," Bausch said. In an effort to address these concerns, he is working with WHO officials to conduct a clinic that will train health care workers headed into Ebola-infected regions.

The WHO has suggested turning to the blood of Ebola survivors as an experimental treatment, and Sacra's doctors have said they are considering it. 

Mehta said Emory doctors have been advising other physicians that some particular types of supportive care did seem to help. Those included switching between different types of IV fluids to meet each patient's specific electrolyte needs at the time. Mehta said medical staff was also giving high-quality liquid nutrition to boost levels or protein and other nutrients "to help build back that immune system that was under attack."

Both Brantly and Writebol were given the experimental drug ZMapp, and credit the drug with helping their recovery, though there is no way to know its effects. Sacra is being treated with a different experimental drug that his doctors have refused to name, but say they've been consulting with Ebola experts.

Details of the latest patient's treatment are not known, but ZMapp could not have been used. Brantly and Writebol were the first to receive it; it had never been tested on humans. The rest of the limited supply was given to five others.

Dr. Gary Kobinger of the Public Health Agency of Canada helped pioneer the research that led to ZMapp and said the U.S. manufacturer appears to be on track for a Phase 1 safety study early next year.

Pharmaceutical companies are working to develop vaccines for Ebola and other alternative drugs to treat the disease, but they're not fully tested or readily available yet. Kobinger said a Canadian-made vaccination candidate should be starting Phase 1 trials within weeks.

At Emory on Tuesday, law student Grace Van Dyke said she had heard that some people around the country were initially concerned about Ebola patients being brought to the U.S. But she never heard worries from the university community.

"Those of us who are at Emory, we're not concerned because we know the quality of Emory medical care, and we know the reason they were brought here is because Emory is capable of containing it and treating them," she said.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://news.yahoo.com/liberia-braces-worst-ebola-death-toll-jumps-180308125.html

Ebola threatening Liberia's existence, minister warns

9/10/14

Monrovia (AFP) - Ebola is threatening the very existence of Liberia as the killer virus spreads like "wild fire", the defence minister warned, following a grim World Health Organization assessment that the worst is yet to come.

After predicting an "exponential increase" in infections across West Africa, the WHO warned that Liberia, which has accounted for half of all fatalities, could initially only hope to slow the contagion, not stop it.

"Liberia is facing a serious threat to its national existence," Defense Minister Brownie Samukai told a meeting of the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

The disease is "now spreading like wild fire, devouring everything in its path," he said.

The WHO upped the Ebola death toll on Tuesday to 2,296 out of 4,293 cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria as of September 6. Nearly half of all infections had occurred in the past 21 days, it said.

The agency also evacuated its second infected medical expert, a doctor who had been working at an Ebola treatment centre in Sierra Leone.

Emory University Hospital in the United States admitted an American on Tuesday who had contracted the disease in west Africa, but declined to confirm whether the patient was the WHO employee.

The hospital has successfully treated two other infected US nationals.

Ebola, transmitted through bodily fluids, leads to haemorrhagic fever and -- in over half of cases -- death. There is no specific treatment regime and no licensed vaccine.

- 'Need to be pragmatic' -
 
The latest WHO figures underscore Ebola's asymmetric spread, as it rips through densely populated communities with decrepit health facilities and poor public awareness campaigns.

Speaking Tuesday, WHO's epidemiology chief Sylvie Briand said the goal in Senegal and Nigeria was now "to stop transmission completely". Senegal has announced only one infection, while Nigeria has recorded 19 infections and eight deaths.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is battling a separate outbreak which has killed 32 in a remote northwestern region.

"But in other locations, like Monrovia, where we have really wide community transmission, we are aiming at two-step strategies," Briand said in Geneva, "first, to reduce the transmission as much as possible and, when it becomes controllable, we will also try to stop it completely.

"But at this point in time we need to be pragmatic and try to reduce it in the initial steps."

A day earlier the WHO had warned that aid organisations trying to help Liberia to respond would "need to prepare to scale up their current efforts by three- to four-fold".

Before the current outbreak, it noted, Liberia only had one doctor for every 100,000 patients in a population of 4.4 million.

In Montserrado county, which contains Monrovia, there are no spare beds at the few Ebola treatment sites operating, the WHO said.

It described how infected people were being driven to centres only to be turned away, return home and create "flare-ups" of deadly fever in their villages.

It said 1,000 beds are needed -- far more than the 240 currently operational and 260 planned.

- Border closure, controls -

Guinea's President Alpha Conde described Ebola as a "war" his nation -- with 555 dead so far -- needed to win.

He slammed neighbouring states including Ivory Coast and Senegal for shutting their borders, and airlines for suspending flights to affected countries.

"They forget that when you close borders, people just go through the bush. It's better to have official passages of transit," he said.

African Union commission chief Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma also called Monday for travel bans to be lifted "to open up economic activities".

In Gambia, customs officials said Tuesday they had closed the borders to Guineans, Liberians, Nigerians and Sierra Leoneans -- though not to neighbouring Senegal.

"We are also advising Gambians intending to travel to these countries to cancel their trips, but any Gambian who fails to heed our advice, we will not allow you in the country if you return," Ebrima Kurumah, a health officer posted at the border with Senegal, told AFP.

There were restrictions further afield, too. China, one of the region's main investors, announced on Tuesday it was reinforcing checks on people, goods and vehicles -- and even mail -- arriving from affected countries.

Meanwhile, Italy announced its first possible case of Ebola -- a woman recently returned from Nigeria.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://m.dw.de/english/mobile.A-17912329-12526.html
Unstoppable: is Ebola mutating with unknown consequences before our eyes?
9/10/14

 Every virus mutates to adapt to its surroundings. Ebola is no exception.

When President Barack Obama announced the deployment of US forces to West Africa he said in an interview on Sunday that immediate intervention was vital.

Otherwise, said Obama, Ebola could mutate, making it more easily transmittable, "and then it could be a serious danger to the United States."

The longer a virus circulates, the more it changes its genetic material.

"Even a single change in the genome can have huge consequences," says Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit, a virologist at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg.

He confirms that mutations can increase the contagiousness of a virus.

Mutations could also make the illness break out sooner, or alternate the course of the disease - increasing the potential of a patient's developing encephalitis.

The disease could also become airborne. And that would be disastrous: the infection rate would increase exponentially.

Hundreds of mutations

An international research team has analyzed about a hundred Ebola virus genomes from 78 patients in Sierra Leone. The patients were diagnosed with Ebola in late May to mid June.

The researchers found more than 300 genetic changes that make the 214 Ebola virus genomes distinct from the viral genomes tied to previous Ebola outbreaks.

Moreover, over 50 changes had occurred since the start of the 2014 outbreak, suggesting the virus is in fact mutating.

There are many cases where a change to the genome of an organism has no consequence.

But in this current outbreak of Ebola - with this particular strain - the researchers found a number of genetic mutations had altered proteins in the virus, potentially with disastrous affect.

The team led by Stephen Gire, a scientist with the Sabeti lab at the Broad Institute and Harvard University, wrote about their findings in "Science".

They say some of the changes could influence doctors' ability to diagnose Ebola in the field.

The data suggest that "continued progression of this epidemic could afford an opportunity for viral adaptation, underscoring the need for rapid containment."

Unknown consequences

But Stephen Gires says they "don't know whether these differences are related to the severity of the current outbreak."

Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit agrees, saying it is impossible to judge by looking at an altered genome whether the changes will translate to alter the biological appearance of a virus.

"Even if a virus mutates rapidly, it doesn't mean something will happen," Schmidt-Chanasit says.

Many changes are minor. They are bound to happen when a virus spills over from one host to another, and especially in an epidemic, such as the one we are seeing in western Africa.

The area of research which investigates the relationship between genomes and the "behavior" of a virus in the field is called reverse genetics, and it's in its infancy.

Schmidt-Chanasit says that if investigations regarding this behavior in Ebola were to start now, they would take long time to complete, and would be of little help in the current outbreak.

Nothing like the flu?

The flu virus is known for its ability to mutate rapidly.

As a result, researchers aim to develop a new flu vaccine every year.

Within the space of every twelve months, the flu virus changes its genome so much that the last year's vaccine is rendered in effective.

"But luckily, Ebola is different," says Schmidt-Chanasit.

Ebola mutates slowly. But it mutates fast enough for it to be able to develop a resistance to any future vaccines and drugs.

For now, though, all attention is focused on the present.

And Schmidt-Chanasit says there are greater challenges than learning how the virus is mutating.

"What makes the situation in West Africa so devastating, are the circumstances," he says.

There are too few hospitals beds, too few medical personnel, and too many people at risk in a crowded part of the world.

[Mark]

Researcher: 20 Percent Chance Ebola Will Spread to US Within 2 Weeks

Ira Longini, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, was part of a team of researchers that used a mathematical model to generate projections of the epidemic spread of Ebola worldwide. The scientists took into consideration daily airline passenger travel worldwide, information about the disease’s spread rate, and other factors. “As the Ebola outbreak in West Africa continues to spread, isolated cases will likely make their way to the United States,” Longini told Newsmax Health. “Our latest estimates show there is a nearly 20 percent chance that this will occur within two weeks.”

http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/ebola-spread-US-america/2014/09/11/id/594097/

[Mark]

No Saudi ban over Ebola for Nigerians going on haj – Arab News

Saudi Arabia, which has barred pilgrims from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea from the haj due to Ebola concerns, will allow Nigerians to attend, an official was reported on Monday as saying, suggesting the smaller outbreak there was less worrying.   

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2014/09/09/no-saudi-ban-over-ebola-for-nigerians-going-on-haj-arab-news/

read that again...

[Mark]

World Health Organization says number of new cases of West Africa Ebola virus outbreak growing faster than ability to manage them - @Reuters

A bit of history for perspective... 

Kissinger, Eugenics
And Depopulation
By Leuren Moret
11-20-4
 

Dr. Henry Kissinger, who wrote: "Depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World."
 
Research on population control, preventing future births, is now being carried out secretly by biotech companies. Dr. Ignacio Chapela, a University of California microbiologist, discovered that wild corn in remote parts of Mexico is contaminated with lab altered DNA. That discovery made him a threat to the biotech industry.
 
Chapela was denied tenure at UC Berkeley when he reported this to the scientific community, despite the embarrassing discovery that UC Chancellor Berdahl, who was denying him tenure, was getting large cash payments - $40,000 per year - from the LAM Research Corp. in Plano, Texas.
 
Berdahl served as president of Texas A&M University before coming to Berkeley. During a presentation about his case, Chapela revealed that a spermicidal corn developed by a U.S. company is now being tested in Mexico. Males who unknowingly eat the corn produce non-viable sperm and are unable to reproduce.
 
Depopulation, also known as eugenics, is quite another thing and was proposed under the Nazis during World War II. It is the deliberate killing off of large segments of living populations and was proposed for Third World countries under President Carter's administration by the National Security Council's Ad Hoc Group on Population Policy.
 
National Security Memo 200, dated April 24, 1974, and titled "Implications of world wide population growth for U.S. security & overseas interests," says:
 
"Dr. Henry Kissinger proposed in his memorandum to the NSC that "depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World." He quoted reasons of national security, and because `(t)he U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less-developed countries ... Wherever a lessening of population can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resources, supplies and to the economic interests of U.S.
 
Depopulation policy became the top priority under the NSC agenda, Club of Rome and U.S. policymakers like Gen. Alexander Haig, Cyrus Vance, Ed Muskie and Kissinger. According to an NSC spokesman at the time, the United States shared the view of former World Bank President Robert McNamara that the "population crisis" is a greater threat to U.S. national security interests than nuclear annihilation.In 1975, Henry Kissinger established a policy-planning group in the U.S. State Department's Office of Population Affairs. The depopulation "GLOBAL 2000" document for President Jimmy Carter was prepared.
 
It is no surprise that this policy was established under President Carter with help from Kissinger and Brzezinski - all with ties to David Rockefeller. The Bush family, the Harriman family - the Wall Street business partners of Bush in financing Hitler - and the Rockefeller family are the elite of the American eugenics movement. Even Prince Philip of Britain, a member of the Bilderberg Group, is in favor of depopulation:
 
"If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels" (Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund, quoted in "Are You Ready for Our New Age Future?" Insiders Report, American Policy Center, December 1995).
 
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been proposing, funding and building Bio-Weapons Level 3 and Level 4 labs at many places around the U.S. even on university campuses and in densely populated urban locations. In a Bio-Weapons Level 4 facility, a single bacteria or virus is lethal. Bio-Weapons Level 4 is the highest level legally allowed in the continental U.S.
 
For what purpose are these labs being developed, and who will make the decisions on where bio-weapons created in these facilities will be used and on whom? More than 20 world-class microbiologists have been murdered since 2002, mostly in the U.S. and the UK. Nearly all were working on development of ethnic-specific bio-weapons (see Smart Dust, Roboflies &).
 
Citizens around the U.S. are frantically filing lawsuits to stop these labs on campuses and in communities where they live. Despite the opposition of residents living near UC Davis, where a Bio-Weapons Level 4 lab was planned, it had the support of the towns mayor.
 
She suddenly reversed her position after a monkey escaped from a high security primate facility on the campus where the bio-weapons lab was proposed. Residents claimed that if UC Davis could not keep monkeys from escaping from their cages, they certainly could not guarantee that a single virus or bacteria would not escape from a test tube. The AWOL monkey killed the project (see Smart Dust, Roboflies&).
 
Population is a political problem. The extreme secrecy surrounding the takeover of nuclear weapons, NASA and the space program and the development of numerous bio-weapons labs is a threat to civil society, especially in the hands of the military and corporations.
 
The fascist application of all three of these programs can be used to achieve established U.S. government depopulation policy goals, which may eliminate 2 billion of the worlds existing population through war, famine, disease and any other methods necessary.
 
Two excellent examples of existing U.S. depopulation policy are, first, the long-term impact on the civilian population from Agent Orange in Vietnam, where the Rockefellers built oil refineries and aluminum plants during the Vietnam War. The second is the permanent contamination of the Middle East and Central Asia with depleted uranium, which, unfortunately, will destroy the genetic future of the populations living in those regions and will also have a global effect already reflected in increases in infant mortality reported in the U.S., Europe, and the UK.
 
References http://www.rense.com/general59/kissingereugenics.htm

[Psalm 51:17]

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-ebola-cases-rising-faster-than-ability-to-contain-them-who-2014-9
We're Losing The Fight Against Ebola
9/12/14

LONDON/GENEVA (Reuters) - The number of new Ebola cases in West Africa is growing faster than authorities can manage them, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday, renewing a call for health workers from around the world to go to the region to help.

As the death toll rose to more than 2,400 people out of 4,784 cases, WHO director general Margaret Chan said the vast nature of the outbreak -- particularly in the three hardest-hit countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone -- required a massive emergency response.

"The Ebola outbreak that is ravaging parts of West Africa is the largest and most complex and most severe in the almost four-decade history of this disease," she told reporters on an international teleconference from Geneva.

"The number of new patients is moving far faster than the capacity to manage them. We need to surge at least three to four times to catch up with the outbreaks."

Chan called for urgent international support in sending doctors, nurses, medical supplies and aid to the worst-affected countries.

"The thing we need most is people," she said. "The right people, the right specialists, and specialists who are appropriately trained and know how to keep themselves safe."

The Ebola infection rate and death toll have been particularly high among health workers, who are exposed to hundreds of highly infectious patients who can pass the virus on through body fluids such as blood and excrement.

Some foreign healthcare workers, including several Americans and at least one Briton, have also become infected while working with patients in West Africa.

Speaking at the same briefing, Cuba's minister for public health, Roberto Morales Ojeda, said his country would be sending 165 healthcare workers to help in the fight - the largest contingent of foreign doctors and nurses to be committed so far.

Chan welcomed Cuba's move and urged others to follow suit.

"If we are going to go to war with Ebola, we need the resources to fight," she said. "We still need about 500 to 600 doctors coming from abroad and at least 1,000 or more health care workers."

She said the three worst affected countries were also running low on "almost everything" - including personal protective equipment, basic medical supplies and body bags.

"Today there is not one single bed available for the treatment of an Ebola patient in the entire country of Liberia," she said.

Although the latest figures show more than 2,400 people have died of Ebola virus infection in West Africa since the epidemic started in March, Chan said even the most up-to-date tolls were likely to lag far behind the reality on the ground.

"Whatever number of cases and deaths we are reporting is an underestimate," she said.

The U.N. health agency had previously warned there could be as many as 20,000 cases in the region before the outbreak is brought under control.

The International Monetary Fund said on Thursday that economic growth in Liberia and Sierra Leone could decline by as much as 3.5 percentage points due to the outbreak, which it said has crippled their mining, agriculture and services sectors. [ID:nL1N0RC17U]

[Psalm 51:17]

http://news.msn.com/world/un-doctors-nurses-play-role-in-both-treating-spreading-ebola
UN: Doctors, nurses play role in both treating, spreading Ebola
9/12/14

GENEVA — The World Health Organization is sounding the alarm that it has too few doctors and nurses willing to work in Africa to respond effectively to the continent's outbreak of Ebola.

Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, told reporters Friday at the agency's headquarters in Geneva that "the number of new patients is moving faster than the capacity to manage them." She said the world health community needs three to four times as many resources at it has committed "to catch up with the outbreaks."

As of Friday, 4,784 people have fallen ill with Ebola, of whom more than 2,400 have died, she said. The most affected countries are Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, where, Chan said, "there is not a single bed available for an Ebola patient in the entire country."

Sarah Crowe, an official of the U.N. Children's Fund, better known as UNICEF, said there were 370 beds occupied by Ebola victims in Liberia. "There's a real sense this virus is taking over the whole country," she said via a teleconference hookup from Monrovia, the Liberian capital.

Chan said the WHO still is seeking 500 to 600 doctors from abroad and at least 1,000 more nurses to dispatch to Africa to counter the epidemic. But with 301 health workers known to be infected with the virus — almost half of whom have died — finding volunteers has been difficult.

"The thing we need most is people," she said. "The right people, the right specialists who are appropriately trained and know how to keep themselves safe."

Cuba on Friday became the largest donor of medical personnel to the Ebola crisis with a pledge to send 62 doctors and 103 nurses to infected areas. Cuba's minister of public health, Roberto Morales Ojeda, announced that his country would dispatch the workers in Geneva. Chan and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had appealed personally to Cuban President Raul Castro for the contribution, Chan said.

The Cuban team will be based in Sierra Leone.

More health care workers are needed. "We need to bring in more human resources if we want this to be effective," Sylvie Briand, the WHO's director of pandemic and epidemic diseases, told McClatchy.

Any people with experience can probably help, Briand said, but she said the effort especially needs people who have worked in physically demanding conditions.

The infection rates for health care workers have been particularly high in Liberia, where 171 have fallen ill, of whom 84 have died, according to a situation update Tuesday from Liberia's Ministry of Health and Social Welfare.

Moreover, nine health care workers have been diagnosed with Ebola, including seven deaths, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the disease's outbreak is unrelated to the outbreak in West Africa, the WHO said.

The infection rate in the three most infected countries is substantially higher for women health care-givers, U.N. officials said.

Infected doctors and nurses also become a means for spreading the disease, David Heymann, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told McClatchy. "Once health workers get infected, they risk infecting other patients and family members," he said. "They're the entry point into the community."

Avoiding infection is a major challenge for workers. Ebola is deadly to as many as 90 percent of the people who contract it, usually through contact with bodily fluids, either directly or when they've been left on other surfaces.

Briand said that the high infection rates among health workers probably reflect a lack of needed safety measures in the early days of the epidemic. "People were not protected enough," she said.

Heymann, a former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the quick spread of the virus probably took place because hospital workers didn't realize they were dealing with Ebola in the early days of the outbreak.

"Ebola resembles malaria, it resembles influenza," he said. "They see a patient with a fever who might look like he's having malaria, or something else," and don't take proper precautions. Then the hospital becomes contaminated and other patients are infected.

The fact that many health care workers in Africa also have jobs outside large public hospitals also may be a factor in spreading the disease.

"Maybe they don't pay as much attention to IPC (infection prevention control) practices when they are operating elsewhere," Briand said. "I know in some circumstances some midwives were helping friends to deliver and this is where they got contaminated."

"It was not within the Ebola world. It was outside the Ebola world," she added.

Still, the WHO says it's likely that the agency is going to have to come up with incentives, including bonus pay, to persuade enough health workers to take on an Ebola assignment, and it has scheduled trips to key cities around the world in an effort to secure more funds and recruits.

[Mark]

Ebola in the air? A nightmare that could happen

Today, the Ebola virus spreads only through direct contact with bodily fluids, such as blood and vomit. But some of the nation's top infectious disease experts worry that this deadly virus could mutate and be transmitted just by a cough or a sneeze. 

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/12/health/ebola-airborne/

[Psalm 51:17]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/12/us-health-ebola-dutch-idUSKBN0H70V520140912
9/12/14
Netherlands to evacuate two doctors who had contact with Ebola victims

(Reuters) - Authorities in the Netherlands are preparing to evacuate two Dutch doctors who had unprotected contact in Sierra Leone with patients who later died of Ebola, a Dutch public health official said on Friday.

The two doctors have shown no symptoms of the virus but authorities believe there is cause for concern because they were not wearing full protective clothing when they came into contact with the patients, who had not yet been diagnosed with Ebola.

"The two doctors' personal protection should be considered inadequate. They could potentially have been exposed," said Jaap van Dissel, director of the Dutch Center for Infectious Disease Control.
 
The two doctors will be evacuated on a special flight to minimise the risk of contagion to other passengers and monitored closely on arrival, according to media reports.

"It's only contagious if they have a fever," van Dissel said, and added that if symptoms developed, the two would be placed in quarantine in a university hospital.

Dutch public television said the case was discovered when the doctors came to the Netherlands' nearest embassy in Ghana after the patients they had been in contact with at the Lion Heart Medical Center in Yele town died of Ebola.

The clinic, which normally deals with cases of malaria, which has symptoms similar to Ebola, has since been shut down by authorities in Sierra Leone.

More than 2,400 people have died so far from Ebola in West Africa since the outbreak started in March, taking a particularly heavy toll among medical workers, more than 120 of whom have died of the disease as of late August, according to the World Health Organization.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/12/health/ebola-airborne
9/12/14
Ebola in the air? A nightmare that could happen

CNN) -- Today, the Ebola virus spreads only through direct contact with bodily fluids, such as blood and vomit. But some of the nation's top infectious disease experts worry that this deadly virus could mutate and be transmitted just by a cough or a sneeze.

"It's the single greatest concern I've ever had in my 40-year public health career," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "I can't imagine anything in my career -- and this includes HIV -- that would be more devastating to the world than a respiratory transmissible Ebola virus."

Osterholm and other experts couldn't think of another virus that has made the transition from non-airborne to airborne in humans. They say the chances are relatively small that Ebola will make that jump. But as the virus spreads, they warned, the likelihood increases.

Every time a new person gets Ebola, the virus gets another chance to mutate and develop new capabilities. Osterholm calls it "genetic roulette."

As of Friday, there have been 4,784 cases of Ebola, with 2,400 deaths, according to the World Health Organization, which says the virus is spreading at a much faster rate now than it was earlier in the outbreak.

Ebola is an RNA virus, which means every time it copies itself, it makes one or two mutations. Many of those mutations mean nothing, but some of them might be able to change the way the virus behaves inside the human body.

"Imagine every time you copy an essay, you change a word or two. Eventually, it's going to change the meaning of the essay," said Dr. C.J. Peters, one of the heroes featured in "The Hot Zone."

That book chronicles the 1989 outbreak of Ebola Reston, which was transmitted among monkeys by breathing. In 2012, Canadian researchers found that Ebola Zaire, which is involved in the current outbreak, was passed from pigs to monkeys in the air.

Dr. James Le Duc, the director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas, said the problem is that no one is keeping track of the mutations happening across West Africa, so no one really knows what the virus has become.

One group of researchers looked at how Ebola changed over a short period of time in just one area in Sierra Leone early on in the outbreak, before it was spreading as fast as it is now. They found more than 300 genetic changes in the virus.

"It's frightening to look at how much this virus mutated within just three weeks," said Dr. Pardis Sabeti, an associate professor at Harvard and senior associate member of the Broad Institute, where the research was done.

Even without becoming airborne, the virus has overwhelmed efforts to stop it.

The group Doctors Without Borders says Monrovia, Liberia, needs 1,000 beds for Ebola patients but has only 240, and it has had to turn patients away, sending them back to neighborhoods where they could infect more people.

This week, a Pentagon spokesman said the United States is sending a 25-bed field hospital to Monrovia.

"A 25-bed hospital with nobody to staff it? That's not the scale we need to be thinking about," Le Duc said. "It's an absolute embarrassment. When there was a typhoon in the Philippines, the Navy was there in 48 hours and had billions of dollars in resources."

Osterholm commended groups like Doctors Without Borders but said uncoordinated efforts by individual organizations are no match for Ebola spreading swiftly through urban areas.

"This is largely dysfunctional. Nobody's in command, and nobody's in charge," he said. "It's like not having air traffic control at an airport. The planes would just crash into each other."

[Psalm 51:17]

http://news.yahoo.com/4th-doctor-dies-ebola-sierra-leone-113453199.html
4th doctor dies of Ebola in Sierra Leone
9/14/14

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) — Sierra Leone has lost a fourth doctor to Ebola after a failed effort to transfer her abroad for medical treatment, a government official said Sunday, a huge setback to the impoverished country that is battling the virulent disease amid a shortage of health care workers.

Dr. Olivet Buck died late Saturday, hours after the World Health Organization said it could not help medically evacuate her to Germany, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brima Kargbo confirmed to The Associated Press.

Sierra Leone had requested funds from WHO to transport Buck to Europe, saying the country could not afford to lose another doctor.

WHO had said that it could not meet the request but instead would work to give Buck "the best care possible" in Sierra Leone, including possible access to experimental drugs.

Ebola is spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of sick patients, making doctors and nurses especially vulnerable to contracting the virus that has no vaccine or approved treatment.

More than 300 health workers have become infected with Ebola in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Nearly half of them have died, according to WHO.

The infections have exacerbated shortages of doctors and nurses in West African countries that were already low on skilled health personnel.

So far, only foreign health and aid workers have been evacuated abroad from Sierra Leone and Liberia for treatment.

Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, Sierra Leone's top Ebola doctor, was being considered for evacuation to a European country when he died of the disease in late July.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/09/12/Lawmakers-to-HHS-Why-Are-Ebola-Warnings-Getting-More-Dire
9/12/14
Lawmakers to HHS: Why Are Ebola Warnings Getting More Dire?

Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are calling on the Department of Health and Human Services for more information about administration’s assertion that the Ebola outbreak is worsening and what is being done to protect the U.S. from the outbreak.

“While U.S. public health officials have offered assurances — both publicly and during briefings with committee staff — that the Ebola outbreak can be controlled, they are expressing increasingly dire warnings about its growth and the need for quick, decisive action,” the six House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders, including committee chair Fred Upton (R-MI) wrote in a letter to HHS Sec. Sylvia Burwell Friday.

What is being called the worst Ebola outbreak ever has claimed more than 2,200 lives in West Africa and lawmakers say they want to be certain the U.S. is prepared to protect against the epidemic.

“In recent days, officials have warned that the emergency response thus far has not contained the outbreak and must be ‘vastly increased and accelerated’ immediately to avoid missing a closing ‘window of opportunity’ to control the deadly virus,” they wrote.

“Last week, Dr. Thomas Frieden, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), warned that the Ebola virus is ‘spiraling out of control’ and ‘moving faster than anyone anticipated,’” the letter continued.

The committee members requested HHS tell them by Sept. 26, why the administration’s warnings have become more dire, the problems to date with containment, the protocols to respond to Ebola in the U.S., how federal funding have been spend to combat Ebola, the current risk the diseases posses to the U.S., assessments of hospitals to respond to an outbreak, as well as the status of medicine.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/ebola/11088674/Bill-Gates-to-spend-50m-fighting-Ebola-outbreak.html
Bill Gates' to spend $50m fighting Ebola outbreak
Gates Foundation make sits largest ever pledge to a humanitarian crisis to help fight against deadly Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa
9/11/14

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Wednesday that it will spend $50 million – on top of $10 million already committed – to support emergency response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, marking the group's largest donation to a humanitarian effort.

"It became clear to us over the last 7 to 10 days that the pace and scope of the epidemic was increasing significantly," Chris Elias, president of global development for the world's largest charitable foundation, said.

The Seattle-based foundation said the money will go to the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and international organisations involved in fighting transmission of the virus.

The money will be used to purchase supplies and to develop vaccines, therapies and better diagnostic tools. The foundation wants to help stop the outbreak as well as accelerate development treatments and improve prevention.

Mr Elias said they have been talking to the foundation's partners around the world to assess the best use of its dollars and could not say yet how much would be spent on the emergency response and how much on research and development.

"One of our key advantages is flexibility," he said.

Global health and development dominate the work of the foundation, which has given away $30 billion since 1997. The foundation formed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife reported an endowment worth $40 billion, as of March 2014.

The foundation was particularly influenced by the request on Friday by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for $600 million to fight the Ebola outbreak.

Ki-Moon said efforts in the next few weeks would be essential to stopping the virus that has killed more than 2,000 people in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria.

The foundation had previously committed more than $10 million on emergency operations, treatment and research. Of that money, $5 million went to the World Health Organization for emergency operations and research and development.

Another $5 million went to the US Fund for UNICEF to support efforts in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea to purchase medical supplies, coordinate response efforts and spread information.

Some of the $50 million will support strengthening existing health care systems in the countries affected by the outbreak, the foundation said.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://washingtonexaminer.com/cdc-issues-ebola-checklist-now-is-the-time-to-prepare/article/2553396
CDC issues Ebola checklist: 'Now is the time to prepare'
9/15/14

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warning hospitals and doctors that “now is the time to prepare,” has issued a six-page Ebola “checklist” to help healthcare workers quickly determine if patients are infected.

While the CDC does not believe that there are new cases of Ebola in the United States, the assumption in the checklist is that it is only a matter of time before the virus hits home.

For example, one part reads: “Encourage healthcare personnel to use a ‘buddy system’ when caring for patients.” Another recommends a process to report cases to top officials:

    Plan for regular situational briefs for decision-makers, including:

    -- Suspected and confirmed EVD patients who have been identified and reported to public health authorities.

    -- Isolation, quarantine and exposure reports.

    -- Supplies and logistical challenges.

    -- Personnel status, and policy decisions on contingency plans and staffing.

The checklist has been distributed to major hospitals and even little ones, including an urgent center in Leesburg, Va.

“Every hospital should ensure that it can detect a patient with Ebola, protect healthcare workers so they can safely care for the patient, and respond in a coordinated fashion,” warns the CDC.

“While we are not aware of any domestic Ebola Virus Disease cases (other than two American citizens who were medically evacuated to the United States), now is the time to prepare, as it is possible that individuals with EVD in West Africa may travel to the United States, exhibit signs and symptoms of EVD, and present to facilities,” it adds.

Several hospital and medical websites have just begun to post the checklist online.

[Psalm 51:17]

Why the Ebola Crisis Won't End Without Military Intervention
By Steve Brozak and Anne Marie Noronha September 16, 2014
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-16/why-the-ebola-crisis-wont-end-without-military-intervention?campaign_id=yhoo

Ebola has evoked our worst nightmares as it continues to outrun containment efforts. The staggering death toll of the disease, projected to rise exponentially, means the modern world faces a global crisis on par with the plagues of history. Unlike seven centuries ago, there are viable options to fight the disease on a global scale. The longer the world takes to exercise those options, however, the less effective and more costly they will become.

Most people expect that some biotech company will eventually create a vaccine or antiviral, and the high-tech cure will swiftly arrive where it is most needed. Countless Hollywood blockbusters have implanted such fictions in our psyches. Unfortunately the pace of science is much slower, even in the face of mass loss of life. It’s true that we have sophisticated manufacturing facilities, but only because of U.S. government spending over the last decade by such agencies as BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) and NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) to address the threat of deadly pathogens. These facilities will become critical to our “mopping up” efforts later on. First, however, we must accept that Ebola is a threat to the entire world.

As the U.N. General Assembly meets on Tuesday, we must come to terms with the fact that a highly coordinated military intervention is absolutely necessary and inevitable. The U.S. and its allies must be obliged to muster a ready force of 15,000 within 30 days, with almost as many health-care personnel to deal with patients and medical screening. Even prior to this, a secured air-bridge system must be initiated while commercial air travel continues to shut down. An air-bridge will be essential to continue uninterrupted transport of health-care workers, medical supplies, and food.

Why is such an organized and robust strategy required? Reports from Liberia indicate that the situation is desperate. Hospitals have become quarantine zones for the dead and soon-to-be dead. Medicine is no longer even being used on people infected with Ebola. It is especially clear that the Liberia’s government is incapable of managing a response; even elected officials have fled the nation. Doctors and nurses have either perished from Ebola or have left the country due to a lack of support and concern for their safety.

Amid the collapse of health-care infrastructure, it is only a matter of time before total chaos descends. The number of infected people is spiraling out of control, with estimates of human infection unreliable. In past outbreaks, transmission contacts in remote areas were counted by the tens; today’s infected contacts can reach the hundreds in an urban setting.

The early symptoms of Ebola—fever, chills and flu-like illness—mimic several other diseases, including malaria. Those who may seem to have the disease are put into wards with patients who really do have Ebola. The impending onset of the hot rainy season will make it even more difficult for remaining health-care workers to adhere to wearing full biohazard suits. This will only aggravate the exponential rise in the number of sick and dead: Some models predict over 100,000 deaths by the end of the year if the rest of the world continues to drag its feet.

Even if Ebola doesn’t mutate to become more infectious, we must accept that this virus is no longer an African problem—so far away geographically that it’s hard to imagine it touching our own lives. A single passenger on a ship or an airplane could spread the virus to another continent. The Ebola crisis is a natural disaster, like a tsunami or earthquake. But unlike natural disasters with limited global consequences, Ebola is perpetual with far-reaching implications. What we must realize is that Africa is our neighbor and Ebola’s global spread is no longer the stuff of fiction.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://news.yahoo.com/china-send-ebola-lab-team-sierra-leone-093658701.html
UN: Nearly $1 billion needed now to stop Ebola
9/16/14

GENEVA (AP) — The number of Ebola cases could start doubling every three weeks in West Africa, the World Health Organization said Tuesday, warning that the outbreak will cost nearly $1 billion to contain so it does not turn into a "human catastrophe."

Even as President Barack Obama is ordering the deployment of 3,000 U.S. military personnel to help provide aid in the region, Doctors Without Borders said the global response to Ebola has been far short of what is needed.

"The response to Ebola continues to fall dangerously behind," Dr. Joanne Liu, president of the medical charity, told a U.N. special briefing on Ebola in Geneva. "The window of opportunity to contain this outbreak is closing. We need more countries to stand up, we need greater deployment, and we need it now."

Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO's assistant director-general, said Tuesday that "this health crisis we face is unparalleled in modern times."

The numbers are staggering: At least 2,400 deaths have been blamed on the outbreak, which has touched Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal since it was first recognized in March.

Half of the nearly 5,000 cases occurred in the last three weeks, and officials said Tuesday that it was not unthinkable that 20,000 could become infected before the outbreak is over.

"It's a potential threat to global security if these countries break down," Obama said, speaking of the hardest-hit countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea

"If the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people affected, with profound economic, political and security implications for all of us," he said after outlining new steps being taken by the U.S. to contain the outbreak.

In addition to the troop deployment, the heightened U.S. role in West Africa will include erecting new treatment and isolation facilities, training health care workers and boosting communications and transportation support, U.S. officials said in Washington.

Hundreds more international health workers will likely be required. Some 3.3 million hazard suits will be needed in the next six months to protect those caretakers from the virus, which is spread by contact with bodily fluids such as blood, urine or diarrhea. Some $23.8 million alone will pay burial teams and buy body bags, since the bodies of Ebola victims are highly infectious.

In a report released Tuesday, WHO said all of this and more will cost $987.8 million. That's 10 times what the organization estimated the outbreak would cost at the beginning of August.

"We risk a humanitarian catastrophe if we do not see rapid action to scale up, not just the Ebola response but also the provision of essential services and the support platform to put that in place," Aylward said.

Recent weeks have seen a flurry of promises of aid.

In addition to the U.S. forces, the U.N. health agency said China has promised to send a 59-person mobile laboratory team to Sierra Leone that includes lab experts, epidemiologists, doctors and nurses. Britain is planning to build and operate an Ebola clinic in Sierra Leone, and Cuba has promised to send the country more than 160 health workers.

"The question is translating these commitments into quick action on the ground," said Dr. Unni Krishnan, head of disaster preparedness and response for the aid group Plan International.

Still, hospitals and clinics in West Africa are now turning the sick away because they don't have enough space to treat everyone — a sure-fire way to increase the spread of the disease, which in this outbreak is killing about half of those it infects.

The United States, in particular, drew criticism last week when it promised to set up a 25-bed field hospital in Liberia to serve health care workers, both local and foreign, who become infected. Many thought the contribution was paltry, given that experts were saying Liberia needed at least 500 more treatment beds.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://washingtonexaminer.com/200000-from-ebola-countries-have-visas-to-enter-u.s./article/2553386
200,000 from Ebola countries have visas to enter U.S.
By Paul Bedard | September 15, 2014 | 9:18 am

There are about 200,000 Africans from countries hosting the deadly Ebola virus who hold temporary visas to visit the United States, greatly raising the stakes it could spread to America, according to a group following the immigration issue.

“Based on State Department nonimmigrant visa issuance statistics, I estimate that there are about 5,000 people in Guinea, 5,000 people in Sierra Leone, and 3,500 people in Liberia who possess visas to come to the United States today,” said Jessica M. Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Add to that “more than 195,000 Nigerians” with visas to visit, or who could already be here, she said of the country that has seen temporary U.S. visas skyrocket.

The government has promised that the U.S. is safe, but that’s not good enough for Vaughan. “At this time, with an extremely serious public health threat and more than 200,000 people who potentially could enter and spread it, either knowingly or unknowingly, the State Department and Department of Homeland Security should disclose to the public what they are doing to prevent travelers infected with Ebola from entering the country,” she told Secrets.

The Ebola crisis is also drawing attention to citizens from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia who overstay their visas. Vaughan said that the overstay rate of those from Ebola-impacted nations should be a concern.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-announce-major-ebola-effort-043320604.html
Ebola: US sends 3,000 troops to W.Africa to 'turn tide'
9/16/14

Washington (AFP) - US President Barack Obama will try to "turn the tide" on the Ebola epidemic Tuesday by ordering 3,000 US military personnel to west Africa to curtail its spread as China also dispatched more experts to the region.

The White House said Obama will travel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta -- where US Ebola victims were treated -- to make the announcement, meant to spur a global effort to tackle the outbreak that has already killed 2,400 people.

It comes as alarm grows that the worst-ever Ebola epidemic which spread through Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea before reaching Nigeria, is out of control. A separate strain of the disease has appeared in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Most of the US effort, which will draw heavily on its military medical corps, will be concentrated in impoverished Liberia -- the worst hit nation -- with plans to build 17 Ebola treatment centres with 100 beds in each.

China is also sending more medics to neighbouring Sierra Leone to help boost laboratory testing for the virus, raising the total number of Chinese medical experts there to 174, the UN said Tuesday.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday it was reconvening its emergency committee in Geneva which declared the outbreak an international health emergency in August, to consider further measures to limit its spread.

Obama will announce that US Africa Command will set up a headquarters in the Liberian capital Monrovia to act as a command and control centre for US military and international relief programmes.

- 500 health workers a week -

But the main element of the push is a six-month training and hygiene drive to tackle the disease head-on.

US advisors will train up to 500 Liberian health care providers per week in how to safely handle and treat victims and their families in a bid to shore up the country's overwhelmed health infrastructure.

The intervention will involve an estimated 3,000 US military personnel, senior officials said, many working at a staging base for transit of equipment and personnel.

Washington will also send 65 experts from the public health service corps to Liberia to manage and staff a previously announced US military hospital to care for health workers who become sick with Ebola.

Ebola prevention kits, including disinfectant and advice, will also be supplied to 400,000 of the most vulnerable families in Liberia.

"What is clear is in order to combat and contain the outbreak at its source, we need to partner and lead an international response," said one senior US official, on condition of anonymity.

China said it is sending a mobile laboratory team to Sierra Leone, where more than 500 people have died so far from Ebola. The 59-person team from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control will include epidemiologists, clinicians and nurses, the WHO said.

"The newly announced team will join 115 Chinese medical staff on the ground in Sierra Leone virtually since the beginning," the agency's chief Margaret Chan said, hailing the new commitment as "a huge boost, morally and operationally".

- 'No threat to US' -

The Obama administration believes its latest emergency action could help "turn the tide" and slow the spread of the epidemic.

The White House however still believes that there is no realistic threat to the United States from Ebola. It believes that any cases that do materialise on the US soil would be quickly isolated.

The US has so far spent $100 million on fighting the epidemic and the US Agency for International Development plans to allocate another $75 million to increase the number of Ebola treatment units and buy protective gear for health providers.

In addition, the administration has asked Congress for a further $88 million. The money is contained in a short term bill to fund the government until mid-December which could pass Congress this week.

More than 100 workers from Centers for Disease Control are already at work in west Africa, and many more staff are coordinating their work at the agency's Atlanta headquarters.

It was unclear how many of the new US personnel would be deployed in direct contact with patients. The number however appears limited.

Obama first said last week that he was going to use a major military deployment to step up US efforts to fight the epidemic.

His remarks, and a recent YouTube message from the president offering guidance to the people of west Africa on halting infections, highlight increasing White House concern about the implications of the rapid spread of the disease.

[Psalm 51:17]

http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/09/16/the-cdc-admits-the-usa-is-on-the-verge-of-a-major-ebola-outbreak/
9/16/14
The CDC Admits the USA Is On the Verge of a Major Ebola Outbreak

In late July and early August, six weeks ago, I warned that we at the point of losing any hope of containing the Ebola virus and I was called a “fear-monger and I was spreading “fear-****”. Many of my colleagues (e.g. Sheila Zilinski) were accused of the same. However, the worm has turned and the truthful media has a new partner in fear-mongering and it is the CDC.

The U.S. Lost the War Against Ebola in July of 2014

On July 30, 2014, I reported that “Patient Zero, Patrick Sawyer, had a layover in Ghana then changed planes in Togo and flew to an international travel hub of Lagos, located in Nigeria. Nigeria is also the site of an Ebola outbreak. “The dad-of-three died five days after arriving in the city”.  His sister, with whom Sawyer had contact, died of Ebola. He should never have been allowed to board any plane.

In the same article I noted that ” a desperate search is on to find the hundreds of passengers who flew on the same jets as Sawyer.  A total of 59 passengers and crew are estimated to have come into contact with Sawyer and effort is being made to track each individual down. There is an inherent problem with this “track down”. Sawyer was traveling two “commuter airports”, in which the exposed population was connecting to other flights; at this point, the spread of the virus would quickly expand beyond any possibility of containment because in less than a half a day, nearly a half a million people would be potentially exposed. Within a matter of a couple of hours, Sawyer’s infected fellow travelers would each have made contact with 200 other passengers and crew. Hours later, these flights would land and these people would have gone home to the friends, families and coworkers across several continents”. This was when the world, and in particular, President Obama had a fighting chance to contain Ebola and all parties failed miserably!

“Mia Culpa” CDC: Within the Past 24 Hours, the CDC Joined the Fear Mongering Business

After I published my July 30th report, United States health officials countered several similar claims by saying that they are not worried because Ebola is only transmitted through exposure to bodily fluids. In other words, the CDC was telling the truthful media to stop “spreading hysteria”. Now it is clear that the CDC is singing a different tune.

Fourteen hours before the publishing of this present article, the CDC has drawn up and released a six-page action plan on how to tackle Ebola, warning US hospitals: “now is the time to prepare“. This stern warning comes a week after the organization warned that  the disease is ‘out of control’, as it has now been revealed that a CDC worker has contracted the illness. At the urging of the CDC and the U.S. government, world leaders have pledged to invest millions in health care in Liberia, where the disease is expected to rage for another 18 months at least. How far can Ebola spread in 18 months? Read on!

The CDC issued six-page Ebola “checklist”, which is designed to help healthcare workers quickly diagnose patients who may be infected, also is designed to show health care workers how to take action to protect themselves from exposure by dawning certain protective gear and doing so in a certain manner…

Nothing Is Being Done To Contain the Virus

An analysis published this week noted that over 6,000 travelers fly from Nigeria to the U.S. every week, one of the countries hardest hit by the deadly Ebola outbreak which can claim the lives of 90% of infected people. Thousands more of these potentially Ebola-infected persons are being allowed to fly from Nigeria to the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, the United Arab Emirates and China, among other countries. And would you care to guess where travelers from the U.K., Canada, France, Germany,  the United Arab Emirates and China frequently fly to? That answer would be the United States. With a 21 day incubation period, and no mandated screenings procedures for people traveling from infected countries, it’s really not a matter of if, but when the virus reaches the United States. This is a recipe for disaster.

The most disturbing news comes from my most trusted confidential military source. My source is the same that told me an attempted rescue of Ambassador Stevens that was thwarted by the Obama administration. This was a fact that did not surface in other venues for months. As a prelude, if there is one thing that could send military leaders over the edge and perhaps mutiny, this is it.

There is a one-two punch coming as it relates to the unfolding Ebola crisis. First, the military has been told to take orders from the Department of Homeland Security with regard to establishing revised quarantine procedures. Part of these plans include putting local police under the jurisdictional command of the military in what we could call a de facto military draft for police officers. In other words, your local police chief and sheriff will taking orders from the Pentagon when it comes to the quarantining and detention of areas and people related to an Ebola outbreak. Perhaps this is the real reason behind Program 1033 which has effectively militarized the police.

This development will effectively convert local law enforcement into a martial law operation unit. Further, this would constitute the means from which martial law can be brought  in through the “back-door” and the military will be an unwitting accomplice. The police and military will not be enforcing martial law, they will be told they are protecting public safety.

The second “punch” centers around the Ebola vaccine and the developments, as well as the future plans related to the roll-out of the vaccine could prove devastating to the people of this country. This will be the topic of next part in this series.

[Psalm 51:17]

When it rains, it pours...

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/09/16/Dick-Durbin-Amnesty-Bill-Will-Help-Contain-Ebola
9/16/14
Dick Durbin: Amnesty Bill Will Help Contain Ebola

On Tuesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said that a comprehensive amnesty bill would have helped America contain the Ebola epidemic in Africa.

Durbin, a member of the Senate's Gang of Eight that wrote the immigration reform bill, said during a Senate hearing on Ebola that the Senate's amnesty bill would have even allowed doctors in the United States to travel to Africa to combat Ebola "without jeopardizing their immigration status."

“We included in the immigration reform bill, which passed the United States Senate, a provision which provided, in one respect, if you are medically trained in Africa and promise to serve in Africa for a period of time before going anywhere else, we would honor that and respect that and not allow people to be recruited into the United States if they still had an obligation to their country,” Durbin said, according to the Washington Times. “And secondly, that doctors in the United States would be able to serve in these crisis situations overseas without jeopardizing their immigration status."

Durbin reportedly lamented that the amnesty bill "was never called for consideration in the House of Representatives.”

[Psalm 51:17]

http://online.wsj.com/articles/scott-gottlieb-and-tevi-troy-ebolas-warning-for-an-unprepared-america-1410910044
Ebola's Warning for an Unprepared America
The slow response to the worsening crisis in Africa shows how vulnerable the U.S. is to bioterror or a pandemic.
9/16/14

The world is finally mobilizing to wage a muscular fight against Ebola's catastrophic spread through West Africa. President Obama has put the Pentagon in charge of a robust, 3,000-person U.S. relief effort in the stricken areas. This is a positive step, but the world is still dangerously ill-prepared for the fight against pandemic outbreaks.

In the case of Ebola, we were late to the battle and are now focused too narrowly on places like Liberia while failing to see West Africa as one big outbreak. We also remain too...