IMF policies blamed for Ebola spread in West Africa. 22 December 2014Last updated at 06:09 ET Sierra Leone, along with Liberia and Guinea, have poor health facilities.
An Empty, Underused Medical Outpost Could Be the Future of the Ebola Fight. GRAND CAPE MOUNT, Liberia — In December 2014, an imam in the Liberian county of Grand Cape Mount decided that he could cure Ebola through prayer and the laying-on of hands.
He traveled from village to village throughout the jungle along the Sierra Leone border, preaching and healing through ritualistic methods. Grand Cape Mount is home to much of Liberia’s Muslim population, and the Islamic traditional healer found a receptive audience. First Ebola boy likely infected by playing in bat tree. 30 December 2014Last updated at 09:02 ET By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online Other researchers have been testing bats in West Africa for Ebola virus The Ebola victim who is believed to have triggered the current outbreak - a two-year-old boy called Emile Ouamouno from Guinea - may have been infected by playing in a hollow tree housing a colony of bats, say scientists.
They made the connection on an expedition to the boy's village, Meliandou. They took samples and chatted to locals to find out more about Ebola's source. The team's findings are published in EMBO Molecular Medicine. High risk Ebola could reach France and UK by end-Oct, scientists calculate. (Refiles to clarify paragraph five) * 75 percent chance virus will hit France by Oct 24 * 50 percent chance virus will hit Britain by then * Data based on disease spread, airline traffic data * With flight restrictions, those numbers 25 and 15 percent By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent LONDON, Oct 5 (Reuters) - Scientists have used Ebola disease spread patterns and airline traffic data to predict a 75 percent chance the virus could be imported to France by October 24, and a 50 percent chance it could hit Britain by that date.
Those numbers are based on air traffic remaining at full capacity. The Grim Future if Ebola Goes Global. Healthcare workers load a man suspected of suffering from the Ebola virus onto an ambulance in Kenema, Sierra Leone, on Sept. 25, 2014.
Tanya Bindra/AP If you listened hard over the weekend to the chatter around the political theater of detaining a nurse returning from the Ebola zone in a tent with no heat or running water, you might have heard a larger concern expressed. It was this: What happens if this kind of punitive detention — which went far beyond what medical authorities recommend — deters aid workers from going to West Africa to help? But what if, because of this weekend’s events, volunteers are discouraged from going to West Africa, for fear of how they will be received on return? Or what if they do go, and their efforts are still not enough? I wanted to be sure I wasn’t over-imagining what might happen next with Ebola, if it is not contained at its source now.
I hoped they would tell me not to be too worried about Ebola becoming a permanent threat in West Africa. S.Leone Ebola outbreak 'catastrophic': aid group MSF. Barcelona (AFP) - Ebola has wiped out whole villages in Sierra Leone and may have caused many more deaths than the nearly 5,000 official global toll, a senior coordinator of the medical aid group MSF said Friday.
Rony Zachariah of Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, said after visiting Sierra Leone that the Ebola figures were "under-reported", in an interview with AFP on the sidelines of a medical conference in Barcelona. "The situation is catastrophic. There are several villages and communities that have been basically wiped out. In one of the villages I went to, there were 40 inhabitants and 39 died," he said. Ebola is an economic black swan. Ebola is inflicting an accumulating economic toll of West Africa.
More and more miners are curtailing operations, one of them Australian: Australian mining firm Tawana Resources has suspended all non-essential field activities at its iron ore project in Liberia because of the risk from the Ebola virus outbreak.The company’s Mofe Creek project, with first phase output of 2mn t of iron ore, will suspend its drilling programme temporarily but continue all other activities associated with its pre-feasibility study not requiring direct field work. Indian:
The Ebola Epidemic Is About to Get Worse. Much Worse. - Michael T. Osterholm - POLITICO Magazine. Ebola is spreading faster than anyone would like to admit, and the current, slow international response to the deadly disease is morphing into a modern tragedy.
On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta confirmed the first case in the United States, in Dallas. If Ebola has already arrived on these shores, imagine how quickly it could be spreading in Africa. Ebola’s dispersion on the African continent must be stopped soon. But right now there exists no realistic scheme to do so: Plan A is failing, there is no real Plan B and the best chance for a magic bullet—Plan C—is at best many months away. A month in #Ebola on Twitter. Geographic-map-16-sep-2014.png (PNG Image, 1330 × 942 pixels) - Scaled (76%) Ebola outbreak: Why has 'Big Pharma' failed deadly virus' victims? - Health News - Health & Families. West Africa's Ebola outbreak, which has now claimed well over 2,000 lives, could have been "nipped in the bud", if a vaccine had been developed and stockpiled sooner – a feat that would likely have been "do-able", said Professor Adrian Hill of Oxford University.
A team led by Professor Hill is to begin trials of an experimental Ebola vaccine fast-tracked into development in a desperate bid to slow the spread of the virus in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. If it passes safety and effectiveness trials, 10,000 doses of the vaccine – co-developed by the Britain's GSK and America's National Institutes of Health (NIH) – could be used to protect health workers in West Africa by December. However, Professor Hill said that the fact that a vaccine had not been available to stop the disease when it emerged in Guinea six months ago represented a "market failure" of the commercial system of vaccine production which is dominated by the pharmaceutical giants. Loading gallery. Sierra Leone's 365 Ebola deaths traced back to one healer. It has laid waste to the tribal chiefdoms of Sierra Leone, leaving hundreds dead, but the Ebola crisis began with just one healer's claims to special powers.
The outbreak need never have spread from Guinea, health officials revealed to AFP, except for a herbalist in the remote eastern border village of Sokoma. "She was claiming to have powers to heal Ebola. Tracing Ebola’s Breakout to an African 2-Year-Old. Photo Patient Zero in the outbreak, researchers suspect, was a 2-year-old boy who died on Dec. 6, just a few days after falling ill in a village in Guéckédou, in southeastern .
Bordering and Liberia, Guéckédou is at the intersection of three nations, where the disease found an easy entry point to the region. Ebola Attacks Kakata: 4 Die, 11 Infected. As of late yesterday afternoon, a registered nurse and three other clinical staff have died at the C.H. Rennie Hospital in Kakata, Margibi , and 11 others working at the facility are said to be showing symptoms of the Ebola disease, the hospital's Medical Director has disclosed. Dr. Adolphus Yeiah told the Daily Observer Wednesday that as the result of the ongoing deaths of the nurses and other support staff,his administration is contemplating shutting down the hospital if results of specimens taken from other nurses and sent for testing in Monrovia prove positive.
In a brief exclusive interview with this newspaper, Dr. Yeiah added that the decision to close the hospital down "is intended to be awarning sign to the public and other institutions that the situation could go from bad to worse, as there are other sensitive health-related issues that we are closely monitoring as well.
" According to Dr. The late Mr. W.H.O. Declares Ebola in West Africa a Health Emergency - NYTimes.com. LONDON — Facing the worst known outbreak of the Ebola virus, with almost 1,000 fatalities in West Africa, the World Health Organization declared an international public health emergency on Friday, demanding an “extraordinary” response — only the third such declaration of its kind since regulations permitting such alarms were adopted in 2007. The organization stopped short of saying there should be general international travel or trade bans, but acknowledged that the outbreak, already in its sixth month, was far from being contained.
One major international medical organization, Doctors Without Borders, responded to the statement with a renewed call for a “massive deployment” of health specialists to the stricken countries. “Lives are being lost because the response is too slow,” it said. Continue reading the main story Video. Phillippines reports possible Ebola cases. Ebola crisis: Virus spreading too fast, says WHO. 1 August 2014Last updated at 18:03 ET Medical workers have been deployed to explain to residents how to protect themselves. 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak. An ongoing epidemic of the Ebola virus has spread throughout Guinea and beyond the nation's borders in West Africa. At least 500 infections and 337 deaths have been reported.[2] Various organizations, including the US Centers for Disease Control, European Commission, and Economic Community of West African States have donated funds and personnel to help counter the outbreak. This ebola outbreak is the worst ever: the first to affect more than one country and the most severe both in the number of cases and dead.
American doctor's Ebola prognosis 'grave' FORT WORTH, Texas — An American doctor who contracted the Ebola virus felt a deep calling to work in Liberia and was exhausted after months of treating patients with the deadly disease. Second American infected with Ebola. Dr. First case of ebola reported in Africa's most populous city Lagos. Sierra Leone's chief Ebola doctor contracts the virus. How to Ignore a Plague — Matter. Ebola virus disease, West Africa – update 18 July 2014. Epidemiology and surveillance The World Health Organization (WHO) continues to monitor the evolution of the Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. The current epidemic trend of EVD outbreak in Sierra Leone and Liberia remains serious, with 67 new cases and 19 deaths reported from 15 – 17 July 2014.
These include suspect, probable, and laboratory-confirmed cases. ‘There is no such thing as Ebola’