Posted on 08/10/2014 12:46:23 AM PDT by Smokin' Joe
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.
Medecins Sans Frontieres names the names in the Ebola outbreak.
See below —
Ebola outbreak reached catastrophic scale due to slow global response: MSF
Helen Branswell, The Canadian Press
Published Sunday, March 22, 2015 9:42PM EDT
http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/ebola-outbreak-reached-catastrophic-scale-due-to-slow-global-response-msf-1.2292293
TORONTO — West Africa’s ongoing Ebola outbreak reached its catastrophic scale because of the failure of a variety of international agencies and the lack of global health rapid response capacity, a new report says.
Medecins Sans Frontieres, which is also known as Doctors Without Borders, released the report to co-incide with the year anniversary of the recognition that Ebola had broken out in Guinea, a part of Africa that had never before dealt with the disease.
The report notes that many observers have suggested the scale of the outbreak was due to a perfect storm-like confluence of factors. The disease appeared at the juncture of three countries with porous borders and fragile health-care systems. And it ravaged people with no prior experience with Ebola and no understanding of how it spreads.
But the report says that analysis is “too convenient an explanation.”
“For the Ebola outbreak to spiral this far out of control required many institutions to fail. And they did, with tragic and avoidable consequences,” says Christopher Stokes, general director of the doctors’ group.
The report says the World Health Organization displayed a lack of leadership, downplaying the threat the outbreak posed when MSF officials were desperately trying to get the world to realize how dangerous the situation in West Africa had become.
“Meetings happened. Action didn’t,” says Marie-Christine Ferir, MSF’s emergency co-ordinator.
The Associated Press reported last week that the idea of declaring the outbreak a global health emergency was floated in early June, but the Geneva-based agency held off taking that step until early August. Emails obtained by the AP suggest the WHO worried the move would anger the affected countries, might restrict travel of Muslims to the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and might have economic consequences. [Isn’t that the definition of a political action, which is exactly what the WHO claimed they didn’t do?]
But the report says the WHO is not the only agency that bears blame. “It would be a mistake to attribute full responsibility for the dysfunctional response to just one agency. Instead, the age-old failures of the humanitarian aid system have also been laid bare for the world to see, rather than buried in under-reported crises like those in Central African Republic and South Sudan,” the report says.
MSF has taken a lead role in Ebola outbreaks for years, setting up and staffing treatment units. But as case numbers exploded across Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the organization virtually begged other non-governmental organizations to help, eventually even asking countries to send military hospitals. It was months before the world began to respond in significant ways.
“In the end, we did not know what words to use that would make the world wake up and realize how out of control the outbreak had truly become,” says Dr. Bart Janssens, director of operations for MSF.
The organization also criticized its own response. Though MSF had helped contain numerous Ebola outbreaks over the past 20 years, its hemorrhagic fevers team was small, comprising about 40 “Ebola veterans.” Others in the operation were initially reluctant to divert more of MSF’s people to the Ebola fight, and MSF says it should have been faster to mobilize the full capacity of the organization.
The MSF report also questions if it might have been able to do more to improve communications in Guinea earlier in the outbreak. Deep distrust of the foreign aid responders persists in some Guinean villages to this day and still hampers containment efforts.
MSF says the outbreak has produced a number of tragic firsts for it, including:
— It was the first outbreak in which MSF lost so many patients, 2,547 at the time the report was written.
— It was also the first time MSF staff became infected with Ebola. So far 28 have been infected and 14 have died.
— For the first time ever, MSF was forced to turn patients away from Ebola treatment units. At one point, a major treatment centre in Monrovia, Liberia opened its gates for 30 minutes a day — just long enough to fill the beds emptied by the previous night’s deaths.
Nearly 25,000 people have been infected since this outbreak began and more than 10,000 of them have died.
_________________
More dirty laundry from Médecins Sans Frontières on Ebola below.
Guinea and Sierra Leone tried to cover up Ebola crisis, says Medecins Sans Frontieres
Report by MSF also accuses US biotech company of failing to spot cases in Sierra Leone
By Colin Freeman6:30AM GMT 23 Mar 2015
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/ebola/11488726/Guinea-and-Sierra-Leone-tried-to-cover-up-Ebola-crisis-says-Medecins-Sans-Frontieres.html
Médecins Sans Frontières has accused the governments of Guinea and Sierra Leone and a leading US biotech firm of obstructing its early efforts to bring the Ebola outbreak under control.
A new report by the aid agency says the governments deliberately underplayed the initial spread of the outbreak last year, and that when MSF warned it could be “unprecedented”, it was criticised for “scaremongering”.
The accusation of scaremongering - also wrongly voiced by the World Health Organisation - slowed the international response to the crisis, which has now claimed nearly 10,200 lives.
The report, compiled as a “lessons learned” exercise, also questions the conduct of a US medical firm, Metabiota, that was monitoring suspected Ebola cases on behalf of the Sierra Leonean health ministry.
Not only did Metabiota apparently fail to detect any cases of the virus in Sierra Leone during the early months of the outbreak, it later refused to co-operate with MSF in providing details of “contact lists” of potentially infected people, forcing the agency to work “in the dark.”
“For the Ebola outbreak to spiral this far out of control required many institutions to fail,” said Christopher Stokes, MSF’s general director. “And they did, with tragic and avoidable consequences.”
MSF, whose medics handled most of the early frontline response to the outbreak, compiled the report to coincide with the anniversary of its own staff being alerted to the crisis. In mid-March last year, doctors in its Geneva office were informed of a “mysterious disease” in Guinea that had killed several people and had baffled the country’s ministry of health.
Dr Michael Van Herp, a senior MSF epidemiologist, was struck by reports that suffers had hiccups - a typical symptom of Ebola - and warned colleagues that they should be “prepared” for an outbreak, even though one had never occurred in west Africa before.
By the end of that month, MSF warned that Guinea was facing an Ebola epidemic “of a magnitude never before seen”, only to be directly slapped down the next day by the WHO, which said there had been only “sporadic cases”.
In early May, meanwhile, the President of Guinea, Alpha Conde, accused MSF of talking up the threat from Ebola to raise extra funds, the report said. And in Sierra Leone, the government instructed the WHO to report only laboratory-confirmed deaths, hiding the scale of the outbreak by excluding the large number of cases of people who died before ever reaching a clinic.
“Needless obstacles made responding more difficult for MSF teams, who were refused access to contact lists and had to start from scratch in determining which villages were affected and where and how to respond,” the report said.
In similar vein, the report criticised Metabiota, which, along with staff from Tulane University in New Orleans, was working as a partner of Kenema Hospital in eastern Sierra Leone in investigating suspected cases for the ministry of health.
The report said that as early as March of last year, health officials in Guinea were seeing Ebola-infected people coming in from over the porous border with Sierra Leone, but that Metabiota and Tulane continued to report no cases at all in Sierra Leone. “Their ongoing surveillance activities seem to have missed the cases of Ebola that had emerged in the country,” MSF said.
It was not until May 26 that a case was first confirmed in Sierra Leone, at which point the government asked for MSF’s help. By then, though, “the hidden outbreak in Sierra Leone mushroomed and reignited the outbreak for its neighbours.”
To make matters worse, MSF said that when it then started operating in Kailahun - the first major infected area in Sierra Leone - neither Metabiota nor Tulane would share information with them.
“The Ministry of Health and the partners of Kenema hospital refused to share data or lists of contacts with us,” said Anja Wolz, an MSF emergency coordinator. “So we were working in the dark while cases just kept coming in.”
The WHO has already acknowledging failings over its response to the Ebola crisis, and that it did not recognise “fairly plain writing on the wall’.
Metabiota, a San Francisco-based firm that describes itself as a “global leader in pandemic threat management”, was already in Sierra Leone prior the Ebola outbreak working on other disease control projects. In December, it received a grant from the European Commission to work on testing and treatment programs for Ebola.
Tulane was not available to comment. But Metabiota defended their work.
“We play a supportive role to governments and we do not conduct independent investigations or surveillance in Sierra Leone,” said a spokesperson.
“Metabiota adheres to international and national agreements and regulations and, in respect of these, is not authorised to share any results in Sierra Leone to parties other than official health authorities.”
The outbreak is still going on and has claimed some 10,200 lives (known), but there are those who gave the disease a 'leg up' when it could have been stopped with far fewer casualties.
Much is as was suspected by some of us, especially with the various attempts here (in the US) to downplay the seriousness of the situation.
Thanks, Joe.
You’re Welcome, trisham!
You’re Welcome, but Dark Wing deserves the lions share of the credit.
Thanks for the ping.
Thanks Joe. I stopped updating numbers because there was insufficient released WHO data with which to do so.
However, there are new announced cases in the US. Not sure we are going to get any better numbers at this point.
Thanks for your hard work maintaining the ping list!
You’re Welcome, PA Engineer!
Thank you Dark Wing!
A good source of info is SHTF Dashboard
You’re welcome, The computer does the remembering, I just have to find it...(8^D)
Blame leadership. They did not respond to numerous warnings.
Ah, many thanks!!
News on effective vaccines and interventions has disappeared as well.
Given our previous discussions, this particular article is relevant:
Liberia reported its first Ebola case in weeks on Friday, a woman whom authorities suspect may have contracted the virus through sexual intercourse with a survivor, in a setback to efforts to halt the outbreak in West Africa.
Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown said that a 44-year-old woman had been transferred to the ELWA Ebola treatment unit in the capital Monrovia after testing positive for the virus.
“Initial suspicion is that she may have contacted the virus through sexual intercourse with a survivor,” the minister said.
Liberia had not reported any new cases for a few weeks. However, health officials have warned that even after areas are declared free of the disease new cases are possible due to sexual transmission.
“Liberia had hoped to declare itself ‘Ebola Free’ next month, but with this case, the country will not be able to do so. The woman, 44 years old, is said to have contracted Ebola from sex with a survivor – exactly what authorities were concerned about happening.”
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/liberia-reports-first-ebola-case-weeks-181812734.html#A09uAQE
Indeed. We have discussed this at work.
It may be that the 42 day requirement for declaring a country Ebola-free will need to be revisited. It would probably be a good idea to monitor men’s semen for the presence of virus... although, realistically, that may not be possible.
One thing in the newest victim’s favor is that, being the only patient, she will receive a level of care that was not possible when there were hundreds of new patients per week. She has a better chance of survival for it.
American who contracted Ebola now in critical condition
Toronto hospital testing recent traveller to West Africa for Ebola
Ebola scare: Sierra Leone announces lockdown of 2.5 million people
US Ebola patient's condition improves: NIH
Police fire tear gas on crowd during Sierra Leone Ebola lockdown
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