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Pamela Engel October 16, 2014While the US is panicking about three Ebola cases in one month, parts of West Africa are deteriorating rapidly, with little sign that the region is getting the outbreak under control. Ebola has hit Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone the hardest because these countries don't have healthcare systems that are equipped to handle the disease. Nurses at hospitals in these countries are "lightly trained and minimally protected" and Ebola patients are dying "surrounded by pools of infectious waste," according to a report in The New York Times. Some hospitals don't have access to running water, soap,...

... Recent studies conducted in West Africa have demonstrated that 95% of confirmed cases have an incubation period in the range of 1 to 21 days; 98% have an incubation period that falls within the 1 to 42 day interval. ...

An Air France plane has been isolated at an airport in Madrid after a patient was reported to have a fever and shivers. The situation is being treated as a suspected case of ebola, a health ministry official was quoted as saying.

The World Health Organization is warning on Tuesday that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa may explode in the coming days as the disease spreads exponentially. In the three West African nations most stricken by the outbreak of the deadly hemorrhagic fever, the WHO warned that there could soon be as many as 5,000 to 10,000 new cases per week by December. “The outbreak is still expanding geographically in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia and accelerating in capital cities, Bruce Aylward, the WHO’s assistant director-general in charge of the Ebola response, said in a briefing with reporters in Geneva,” Bloomberg...

WHO recommendations for testing for Ebola virus disease and confirming a case WHO is alarmed by media reports of suspected Ebola cases imported into new countries that are said, by government officials or ministries of health, to be discarded as “negative” within hours after the suspected case enters the country. Such rapid determination of infection status is impossible, casting grave doubts on some of the official information that is being communicated to the public and the media.

Frieden on TV now. He looks and sounds a lot less confident than he did several days ago. The Ebola team sounds a lot like the NTSB Go team that rushes to the scene of an airliner crash, except this team will be wearing NBC suits. Says 48 or so people are now on the watch list for Ebola, all healthcare workers. Says CDC is casting a wide net to find anyone who might have been exposed. Includes 76 more people to be monitored "actively." Notes that it is "very anxiety-provoking" to have been maybe exposed to ebola. I'll bet....

A World Health Organization official says there could be up to 10,000 new cases of Ebola per week within two months.

What is a Lady Rizo show all about?

...The lawmakers accused Obama of attempting to “pass the buck” onto organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO), which have advised against travel bans. Obama has said he would not ban travel unless the WHO reversed its position. “[The WHO] has no duty to protect the lives and well-being of Americans, as you do. Furthermore, it has utterly failed to stem the epidemic through its own action. The responsibility for this decision is yours, not theirs,” they wrote. The three Democrats — Reps. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Dave Loebsack (D-Iowa) – are among the growing handful in...

The family of Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan are venting their outrage that the late Liberian may not have received the same quality of care leading up to his death Wednesday morning as the other patients treated in the U.S. for the dreaded virus. 'No one has died of Ebola in the U.S. before. This is the first time,' Duncan's furious nephew Joe Weeks told ABC. Weeks and others in Duncan's family are calling his treatment 'unfair,' after seeing other patients pulled from the brink of death in government-funded evacuation planes and using life-saving blood transfusions and cutting edge drugs....

It emerged Wednesday that Teresa Romero Ramos, a nurse who caught Ebola after helping treat a patient, made multiple attempts to report her fever RECOMMENDED FOR YOU Emmys 2014: Sarah Silverman Says She Brought Weed Released Ebola Patient: "I Am Thrilled To Be Alive" How To Trace The Spread of Ebola From The First US Patient by Taboola A Spanish nurse who contracted Ebola in Madrid this week told health authorities at least three times she had a fever before she was finally placed in quarantine, it emerged Wednesday, despite having helped treat a patient who later died of the...

(Reuters) - Sex could keep the Ebola epidemic alive even after the World Health Organization (WHO) declares an area free of the disease, one of the discoverers of the deadly virus said on Tuesday. The WHO is hoping to announce later this week that Nigeria and Senegal are free of Ebola after 42 days with no infections -- the standard period for declaring an outbreak over, twice the maximum 21-day incubation period of the virus. However, it appears the disease can last much longer in semen. "In a convalescent male, the virus can persist in semen for at least 70...

Shortages In spite of Donations, Why? Donations have been pouring in from China, Belgium, the UK and many parts of the world. Even Liberians in U.S. Cities, Minneapolis, Washington and New York have been rallying to send supplies home. A chartered flight recently landed with the Chinese donation, including 10,000 PPEs and others anti Ebola materials at the Roberts International Airport recently. Local charity groups are also stepping in with contributions of their own. Late last month (Aug. 24-31), the U.S. Government, through DART, airlifted more than 16 tons of medical supplies and emergency equipment to Liberia, including: 500 infrared...

Sep 23, 2014 The World Health Organization has released a new study warning that the situation is quickly growing worse. The new study by WHO experts and scientists at Imperial College London, published today by The New England Journal of Medicine (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1411100), is "excellent" because it fills some important gaps, says Preben Aavitsland, a Norwegian epidemiologist. “For instance, the study gives an average length of hospital stay of 6.4 days,” he says. That is important to know, because it means that about as many beds are needed as there are new Ebola cases every week. It also means that tens...

Ebola virus disease Fact sheet N°103Updated September 2014 Key facts Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola haemorrhagic fever, is a severe, often fatal illness in humans. The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission.The average EVD case fatality rate is around 50%. Case fatality rates have varied from 25% to 90% in past outbreaks.The first EVD outbreaks occurred in remote villages in Central Africa, near tropical rainforests, but the most recent outbreak in west Africa has involved major urban as well as rural areas.Community engagement is key to...

The report said two new areas, in Guinea and Liberia, have recorded their first confirmed cases of Ebola in the last seven days. It also highlights the risk of infection for health workers trying to stem the outbreak. It says 375 workers are known to have been infected, and that 211 have so far died from the virus. The deaths and sickness have made it even more difficult for the already weak healthcare systems in the affected countries to cope with the outbreak. There is a severe shortage of hospital beds, especially in Liberia.

(Reuters) - The death toll from an outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has risen to at least 3,091 out of 6,574 probable, suspected and confirmed cases, the World Health Organisation said on Friday. Liberia has recorded 1,830 deaths, around three times as many as in either Guinea or Sierra Leone, the two other most affected countries, according to WHO data received up to Sept. 23.

September 26, 2014AFPGeneva (AFP) - Thousands of experimental Ebola vaccine doses from British GSK and US NewLink should be ready for use by early 2015 in countries affected by the epidemic, the World Health Organization said Friday. "If everything goes well, we may be able to begin using some of these vaccines in some of the affected countries at the very beginning of next year," said WHO assistant director general Marie-Paule Kieny. There is no licensed treatment or vaccine against the virus that has killed nearly 3,000 people in West Africa, and the UN health agency has endorsed rushing through...

In the worst case scenario, cases in two nations could reach 1.4 million in January, according to a US estimate.

World Health Organization researchers issued a dire new forecast for the Ebola epidemic Tuesday, one that sees 20,000 cases by November, much sooner than previous estimates. And 70 percent of patients are dying. That's a big increase over the previous estimates of a 50 percent fatality rate. “These data indicate that without drastic improvements in control measures, the numbers of cases of and deaths from Ebola virus disease are expected to continue increasing from hundreds to thousands per week in the coming months,” the WHO Ebola Response Team, led by Dr. Christopher Dye, wrote in a report rushed into print...