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At least 4,877 people have died in the world's worst recorded outbreak of Ebola, and at least 9,936 cases of the disease had been recorded as of Oct. 19, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday, but the true toll may be three times as much. The WHO has said real numbers of cases are believed to be much higher than reported: by a factor of 1.5 in Guinea, 2 in Sierra Leone and 2.5 in Liberia, while the death rate is thought to be about 70 percent of all cases. That would suggest a toll of almost 15,000.

I have spent a little time compiling links to threads about the Ebola outbreak in the interest of having all the links in one thread for future reference. Please add links to new threads and articles of interest as the situation develops. Thank You all for you participation.

The empirical evidence of an airborne Ebola Strain is overwhelming Hat Tip GWP - Patrick Sawyer was the American businessman, who contracted Ebola while working in Liberia, then collapsed after he got off a plane to Nigeria and died July 25. He was the first patient in Nigeria with the Ebola virus. The Nigerian authorities have refused to release the names of other passengers on the plane with Mr. Sawyer, or notify the media of their status.

U.S. Army warns of potential 'airborne' Ebola Virus could be transmitted by means other than contact NEW YORK – While Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization officials continue to insist Ebola cannot be transmitted by air from one person to another, an Army manual clearly warns the virus could be an airborne threat in certain circumstances. The handbook published by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, USAMRID, titled “USAMRID’s Medical Management of Biological Casualties Handbook,” is now in its seventh edition. The most recent edition was published in 2011, with more than 100,000 copies distributed...

Kevin LoriaOctober 6, 2014 The idea that Ebola could go airborne is terrifying. Once you are infected, few diseases are more likely to kill you — and death by hemorrhagic fever, diarrhea and vomiting often accompanied by bleeding and organ failure, sounds particularly awful. At present it's hard to get infected — healthcare workers and family members caring for victims are at highest risk — but that would change if the virus were to mutate so that it could be transmitted through the air while keeping its present lethality. That's a nightmare scenario. But it's more the stuff of bad...

Bloomberg - link and title only.

<p>Muslim burial practices are being blamed for the spread of Ebola.</p> <p>Remains of Secretary General of The Nigeria Supreme General for Islamic Affairs and Seriki of Egbaland, Alhaji Lateeef Adegbite at his burial in 2012.</p> <p>Islam requires family members to personally wash the corpses of loved ones from head to toe. This practise is putting more Africans at risk to catch the disease that is spread by body fluids.</p>

We believe there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles both near and at a distance from infected patients, which means that healthcare workers should be wearing respirators, not facemasks.1 The minimum level of protection in high-risk settings should be a respirator with an assigned protection factor greater than 10. A powered air-purifying respirator (PAPR) with a hood or helmet offers many advantages over an N95 filtering facepiece or similar respirator, being more protective, comfortable, and cost-effective in the long run. We strongly urge the US Centers for Disease...

Jennifer Philips has been in America only three days, and she's already calling it home. The 21-year-old left Liberia last week and with it childhood memories of civil war and, more recently, horrific images of dead bodies in the street from the worst ever outbreak of Ebola. Her father, Barhyeau Philips, welcomed her Saturday at the Quad-City International Airport and brought her to his Rock Island home. "I'm here to live," she told the Quad-City Times on Monday. After waiting four years for a visa, Jennifer's journey began Friday at the airport in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. From there she...

The Obama administration has failed us. With that in mind, potential treatments/vaccines for Ebola are being worked on and tested as we speak, and despite the lack of ability to pay for any potential vaccine on the part of almost all western Africans, pharmaceutical companies should develop said vaccine(s) (if at all possible) and distribute them free of cost to those who cannot afford them. While I do support huge profits to be made by pharmaceutical companies, I believe that there are exceptions to the rule, and I do believe that this is the time and instance for this very...

Says he kissed nurses who cared for earlier patients at Emory: "It is not like the flu; it is not airborne." WASHINGTON — President Obama said at a cabinet meeting on Ebola today that he is “absolutely confident that we can prevent a serious outbreak of the disease here in the United States.”Just over a week ago, the president said “the chance of an ebola outbreak in the United States is extremely low.”Obama called today’s meeting after a second nurse from the Dallas hospital where Liberian patient Thomas Eric Duncan was treated fell ill with the virus. He had been...

President Barack Obama, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NiH) keep reiterating that we the American people need not worry about the Ebola virus – that it stands no chance of blowing up across the country. President Obama himself said, “The chances of an Ebola outbreak here in the United States are extremely low.” According to HealthDay, back in late July, CDC official Stephan Monroe asserted that “the fact that most flights between West Africa and the United States require one or more stops in other countries make it unlikely that a sick person...

This Ebola outbreak is being called the “most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times“, and the U.S. health care system is completely and totally unprepared for it. The truth is that most U.S. hospitals are simply not equipped to safely handle Ebola patients, and most hospital staff members have received little or no training on Ebola. And the fact that Barack Obama and our top public health officials are running around proclaiming that Ebola is “difficult to catch” is giving doctors and nurses a false sense of security. There is a reason why Ebola has been classified as...

"The guidelines were constantly changing" and "there were no protocols" at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas as the hospital treated a patient with Ebola, the president of National Nurses United said in a statement on Tuesday. Protective gear nurses wore at first left their necks exposed, union co-president Deborah Burger said, citing information she said came from nurses at the hospital. The union said it would not identify the nurses it spoke with in order to protect them from possible retaliation.

A health care worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital has tested positive for Ebola after a preliminary test, the hospital said in a statement. Confirmatory testing will be conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The employee helped care for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States. Duncan died on Wednesday.

Fears of a global Ebola outbreak spread yesterday as French officials sealed off a building with 60 people inside, an Australian nurse was tested for the disease and airplane cleaners went on strike in New York. In France, police imposed a lock-down on a social services centre in a town near Paris after four people who arrived from Guinea this month fell ill with headaches and fever. Officials in Cergy Pontoise, northwest of the capital, later said that the fears that the four were suffering from Ebola were a false alarm and the nearly 60 others inside were allowed to...

A Madrid nurse who became the first person to contract ebola outside of Africa is being treated with antibodies from survivors of the illness, hospital officials have revealed. A second nurse who also helped treat an infected priest is among the four being monitored by health workers, as is a man who arrived on a flight from Nigeria displaying symptoms. Spain's health authorities said they had been in touch with a total of 22 people who are thought to have been in contact with the 40-year-old nurse, whose name has not been released. They are also monitoring around 30 other...

On CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper on Monday, guest Dr. Michael Osterholm of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy spoke about the risk of infection that the United States and the world face in the growing Ebola epidemic. Osterholm offered two somewhat startling observations about the nature of our knowledge of the disease and its growth. "Six months ago, if you asked Ebola experts would we be seeing the situation we're seeing now, they would have said 'no'." Tapper asked Osterholm about his statement in a column he wrote in the New York Times warning of the...

Link to Illegal Immigrant Children? Enteroviruses commonly circulate in the U.S. during summer and fall. EV-D68 was first identified in California in 1962. Over the past thirty years, only small numbers were reported in the U.S. The CDC hasn’t suggested reasons for the current uptick or its origin. Without that answer, some question whether the disease is being spread by the presence of tens of thousands of illegal immigrant children from Central America admitted to the U.S. in the past year. The origin could be entirely unrelated. However, a study published in Virology Journal, found EV-D68 among some of the...

[MercoPress.com] VENEZUELA : Mysterious outbreak of hemorrhagic fever syndrome in Venezuela kills ten "An outbreak of a mysterious hemorrhagic fever syndrome in the Venezuelan state of Aragua and the country’s capital Caracas has left ten people dead in the last three weeks." Similar to Ebola, this syndrome causes patients to experience high fever, skin rashes and bleeding. It has been described as an aggressive disease that leads to a fatal deterioration of health within 72 hours. Doctors have urged government authorities to declare a state of emergency in Aragua state; however they have received resistance from a surprising source. The...