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.
Ebola isn’t over.
It isn’t contained.
The reserves of long term Ebola(+) human semen infections has yet to really surface.
And East Africana are still hiding Ebola’s spread from authorities.
We are in a holding pattern due to local cultural trust issues that won’t allow good public health chain of transmission tracking to really kill off this outbreak.
Vaccines might be able to defeat the local cultural issues...might.
But we are not there yet.
Ebola Proves Persistent in Guinea, Where Crisis Started
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ebola-proves-persistent-in-guinea-where-crisis-started-1427930613
Betsy McKay. April 2, 2015
More than a year after Ebola began spreading in West Africa, public-health authorities are struggling most to stop it in the country where it began.
The epidemic, so explosive last summer and fall, has been contained to a coastal area around and between the capital cities of Guinea and Sierra Leone. But the number of new cases is still staggering for an Ebola outbreak—82 in the week ended March 29, according to the World Health Organization. Most are in Guinea, where the first cases of the deadly disease were diagnosed in March 2014.
Guinea closed the border with Sierra Leone this week to try to stamp out the remaining epidemic. The number of cases in Sierra Leone is declining.
Health workers confront many of the same obstacles in Guinea now that they did last year, though this time on the other end of the country. Fearful, suspicious locals drive Ebola workers away. Some care for their sick loved ones at home, or bury highly infectious corpses with their own hands, despite warnings that the deadly virus spreads through bodily fluids.
“There’s a lot of resistance,” said Raphaël Delhalle, field coordinator in Conakry for Doctors Without Borders, on a recent afternoon, just after the humanitarian aid group had admitted more than 10 patients for treatment. “The population is still thinking Ebola doesn’t exist, or that we are giving them Ebola.”
Recently, he said, a woman in a Conakry neighborhood pulled a knife on a medical team, including a Doctors Without Borders staff member, forcing them to leave.
Officials say they are confident they will rid West Africa of the epidemic. But to do that, they will have to overcome persisting resistance in communities and track down every last case. Guinea is especially important: It is the largest of the three most heavily affected countries, a gateway to much of West Africa, bordering six countries.
Liberia appeared to have extinguished the epidemic in early March, when the person with its last known case was released from a clinic. But those hopes were shattered later in the month when a woman was diagnosed with and then died of the disease, setting off a scramble to find and monitor all those who had contact with her.
Guinea has had far fewer Ebola cases than either Sierra Leone or Liberia, where the virus took off in capital cities. Guinea also has a more developed public-health system—one that helped prevent the virus from exploding in the capital, said Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who traveled to Guinea in March. But, he added, “paradoxically, because of that, there is less awareness and less behavior change.”
Guinea also has some bigger challenges, including a larger, more culturally diverse population, less-developed road and radio networks and fewer nongovernmental organizations providing social support, Dr. Frieden said. Liberia and Sierra Leone also had help battling Ebola from the U.S. and British militaries, respectively, health officials note.
Guinea has received less foreign aid than its two Ebola-affected neighbors. Of $5.1 billion made available by foreign governments, private funders and others as of the end of January, $543 million was specified for use in Guinea, compared with $1.28 billion for Liberia and $1.15 billion for Sierra Leone, according to the United Nations Office of the Special Envoy on Ebola. Another $835 million was for the region generally and an additional $1.2 billion was either for other activities such as research and development, or it hadn’t been earmarked or allocated.
“There is a very strong case to be made for the international community to consider very seriously offering more resources to Guinea,” David Nabarro, the U.N. special envoy on Ebola, said in an interview, citing a need for infrastructure improvements and more health experts to help with the epidemic.
Now, Guinean and international officials are redoubling their efforts to stamp out the disease. The CDC has sent fewer staff to Guinea than either Liberia or Sierra Leone over the past several months “simply because we don’t have a lot of French speakers,” Dr. Frieden said. But it now has 52 staffers in the country, up from 24 at the end of December, while 46 are currently in Liberia and 89 in Sierra Leone. Dr. Frieden said he has talked with French-speaking nations about supplying more epidemiologists.
The WHO recently engaged social anthropologists and communications experts to draft a report on the causes of community resistance, and has been addressing them one by one, said Jean-Marie Dangou, the agency’s representative in Guinea. “Communities perceived our interventions as top down, they wanted to be part of the response,” he said. “They wanted us to explain more extensively what the disease is, what are preventive measures, and decide on their own what to do.”
Unicef has funded 21 radio stations—along with fuel to keep them running— that reach as much as 80% of the country with information about preventing and treating Ebola, said Guy Yogo, the agency’s deputy representative in Guinea. They include a station that serves Forecariah, a town in western Guinea that has had multiple Ebola cases recently and had no station for months, he said. The stations have helped to counter rumors “and to provide a voice to people to interact and share experiences,” he said. “It has been really, really helpful.”
Unicef has also organized door-to-door campaigns in communities, led by a community messenger, and organized forums at which local Ebola survivors speak. Such efforts to teach people how to prevent Ebola and get treated helped the forest region where it started rid itself of the disease, he said.
“We want to replicate what we did in Conakry and surrounding districts,” he said. Already, “things are really improved.”
A 9-year old boy apparently died of a blood transfusion in Eastern Sierra Leone.
(Reuters) - Sierra Leone’s eastern district of Kailahun, once a hotbed of Ebola, has recorded its first case in nearly four months, threatening progress made to stamp out the disease, officials said on Saturday.
A 9-month-old boy tested positive for Ebola after dying in Kailahun, the district on Guinea’s border that recorded Sierra Leone’s first Ebola case last May and was for months the epicenter of the crisis.
Kailahun went from recording up to 80 infections per week in June to zero cases at the end of last year. Nearly 3,800 people have died of Ebola in Sierra Leone but numbers of weekly cases are falling as steps to control the disease take hold.
However, Winnie Romeril, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organisation, said local and foreign experts had been dispatched to investigate the case after the positive test result.
Alex Bonapha, the Kailahun district council chairman, said it was not clear how the boy may have contracted Ebola as both his parents were healthy.
He said the boy may have gotten the disease during a blood transfusion or there may have been a problem with the sample that was tested.
Sources at the Nixon Hospital in Kailahun District confirmed that the boy underwent a blood transfusion before dying.
“I am aware of the weakness in the health system which means that the blood transfused into the baby could well not have been the blood that had been donated by his uncle,” Bonapha said.
A ministry of health official expressed serious concern over the case, which came as the focus of local and international health officials is on the north and west of the country, the latest areas affected by Ebola.
Liberia, once the hardest hit of all the countries in West Africa, has detected no Ebola cases after the last confirmed patient died at the end of March.
However, Guinea has imposed a 45-day state of health emergency to tackle a spike of cases in the country where the outbreak was first confirmed last year.
As part of these measures, authorities closed all private medical clinics in Kindia, 135 km (84 miles) from the capital Conakry, after a new case of Ebola was recorded there.
The worst Ebola outbreak on record has now killed nearly 10,500 people, mainly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
I haven’t found any updates to the following.
We should have heard of something this past week end.
Patient evaluated for Ebola at Colorado hospital after seeing symptoms
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/02/us-health-ebola-colorado-idUSKBN0MT0TO20150402
Apr 2, 2015
A patient was being evaluated for Ebola in isolation at a Colorado hospital on Thursday after experiencing symptoms of the disease, health officials said.
The patient, who was not identified and was considered low-risk, had recently traveled to an Ebola-affected country and was taken to the Medical Center of the Rockies some 50 miles (80 km) north of Denver on Wednesday evening after falling ill, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said in a statement.
The department expected test results to be known later on Thursday morning, the statement said, adding that the person was also being tested for other conditions.
Further details on the patient were not immediately provided.
At least 10 people are known to have been treated for Ebola in the United States - four of them diagnosed with the disease on U.S. soil - during a West African epidemic that has killed more than 10,000 people, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, over the last year.
Only two people are known to have contracted the virus in the United States - both of them nurses who treated an Ebola patient from Liberia who became sick while visiting Dallas. That man, Thomas Duncan, died in October.
(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Researchers develop Ebola vaccine effective in a single dose
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-04-ebola-vaccine-effective-dose.html
“Science is settled”, they have deemed this vaccine safe.
>>“Science is settled”, they have deemed this vaccine safe.
When they are distributing tens of thousands of doses for vaccinations in East Africa, without complications, I’ll believe.
Good news —
Press Release
For Immediate Release
April 14, 2015
Contact: CDC Media Relations
(404) 639-3286
Ebola vaccine trial begins in Sierra Leone
6,000 health and other frontline workers will receive vaccine in five districts of the country
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in partnership with the Sierra Leone College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS) and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS), is now enrolling and vaccinating volunteers for the Sierra Leone Trial to Introduce a Vaccine against Ebola (STRIVE). This study will assess the safety and efficacy of the rVSV-ZEBOV candidate Ebola vaccine among health and other frontline workers.
“A safe and effective vaccine would be a very important tool to stop Ebola in the future, and the frontline workers who are volunteering to participate are making a decision that could benefit health care professionals and communities wherever Ebola is a risk,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. “We hope this vaccine will be proven effective but in the meantime we must continue doing everything necessary to stop this epidemic —find every case, isolate and treat, safely and respectfully bury the dead, and find every single contact.”
STRIVE will enroll about 6,000 health and other frontline workers. It will be conducted in Western Area Urban district, which includes Freetown, Western Area Rural district, and certain chiefdoms in Bombali, Port Loko, and Tonkolili districts. These study locations were selected because they have been heavily affected by the Ebola outbreak in the past few months.
“We are happy to be partnering with MoHS and CDC on this important study, which may help to prevent future cases of Ebola,” said Mohamed Samai, M.B., Ch.B., Ph.D., acting Provost of COMAHS and the study’s principal investigator. “It brings me hope and pride that my country can take from this devastating epidemic something that may benefit people around the world.”
When participants enroll in the study, they will be assigned randomly to one of two timeframes for vaccination – either immediately or about six months later. All study participants will receive the vaccine and be followed closely for six months. The study will evaluate if and how well the vaccine worked by comparing rates of Ebola virus disease in those who are vaccinated to those who have not yet received the vaccine.
Learn more about STRIVE at www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/strive/.
Not ebola, but very deadly
Mysterious disease that kills patients within 24 hours leaves at least 18 dead in Nigeria
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-18/mysterious-disease-in-nigeria-kills-18/6403558
“Seventeen people have died of the mysterious disease since it broke out early this week in Ode-Irele town,” said Ondo state government spokesman Kayode Akinmade.
The disease, symptoms of which include headache, weight loss, blurred vision and loss of consciousness, killed the victims within 24 hours of their falling ill, he said.
Laboratory tests have so far ruled out Ebola or any other virus, Mr Akinmade added.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said it had information on 14 cases with at least 12 dead.
“Common symptoms were sudden blurred vision, headache, loss of consciousness followed by death, occurring within 24 hours,” spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said.
Another WHO spokesman, Gregory Hartl, told AFP that according to a preliminary report, all those affected began showing symptoms between April 13 and 15.
Mr Akinmade said health officials and experts from the government and aid agencies, as well as WHO epidemiologists, had arrived in Ode-Irele to search for answers.
“There is no patient of the disease in any hospital and the disease has not spread beyond the town,” he said.
Ondo state health commissioner, Dayo Adeyanju, told AFP that he and his officials went on a “field visit” with the WHO, UNICEF and the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).
“This was basically a case search to unravel the cause [of the disease],” he said.
Mr Jasarevic said blood and urine samples had been taken from two victims and cerebrospinal fluid from another.
“All samples have been sent to Lagos University Teaching Hospital this morning, and results are still pending. Investigations are still ongoing,” he said.
Just saw the information about the disease .. "spookey".
Death within 24 hours ...
This is from another Freep thread.
CDC: Woman may have gotten Ebola after sex with survivor
Washington Examiner ^ | May 1, 2015 | Robert King
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3285577/posts
and from the replies to the thread —
Here is the reference:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9988181
In the table, the 82 day seminal fluid sample contained virus that was cultured in cells, meaning it was active. Several other samples only contained RNA, but did not infect cells.
Earlier on in the outbreak, it was mentioned that live virus had been found in the semen of survivors for 60 days after they had tested ‘clean’ otherwise. It was cause for concern then, and apparently the time for remaining infectious (via sexual contact after recovery) has been extended by more data.
This is scary-strange.
Ebola can survive in your eyes long after the rest of your body is clear of the disease.
http://m.livescience.com/50773-ebola-eye-problems-ian-crozier.html
An American doctor who recovered from Ebola developed serious eye problems months later because the virus had lingered in his eye, according to a new report of his case.
Dr. Ian Crozier, now 44 years old, contracted Ebola in September 2014 while treating patients in Sierra Leone. Crozier’s eye problems were so serious that he nearly lost his vision, but his sight has since recovered, according to the new report, which Crozier co-authored.
“This case highlights an important complication of [Ebola virus disease], with major implications for both individual and public health that are immediately relevant to the ongoing West African outbreak,” the researchers wrote in the report, published online today (May 7) in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Shortly after Crozier became ill in Africa, he was evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where he received intensive treatment, including being placed on a ventilator for 12 days and undergoing dialysis for kidney failure for nearly a month.
After more than 40 days of treatment, his condition improved. He was declared Ebola-free and was released from the hospital.
But he soon began to experience eye problems, including a burning sensation and the feeling that there was something in his eye, according to the report. He also needed a new prescription for his reading glasses. Following an eye exam, Crozier was diagnosed with uveitis, an inflammation of the uvea, or the middle tissue layer of the eye.
One month later, about nine weeks after he had been declared Ebola-free, Crozier had new eye symptoms, including redness, blurred vision with halos and pain, and increased pressure in his left eye. He was started on treatment with eye drops to reduce the eye inflammation, and drugs to lower the pressure in his eye. [What Are the Long-Term Effects of Ebola?]
But his symptoms continued to worsen over the next few days, so his doctors performed a procedure to remove fluid from his eye, and tested it for the Ebola virus.
They found that a sample from the aqueous humor — the fluid between the eye’s outer covering and the lens — tested positive for Ebola. However, samples of Crozier’s blood, tears and conjunctiva tissue (which lines the eyelid and white part of the eye), tested negative for Ebola.
Over the next five days, Crozier’s eye inflammation continued, and he experienced some vision loss. Three days later, the inflammation improved, but he still had severe vision impairment in his left eye.
Three months after his first diagnosis with eye inflammation, his condition had improved and he had recovered his vision, the researchers said.
There have been previous reports of eye problems in Ebola survivors. After the 1995 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 15 percent of survivors in a follow-up study had developed eye problems, such as eye pain and vision loss. And a recent survey of 85 Ebola survivors in Sierra Leone found that 40 percent reported eye problems.
Crozier’s eye problems were likely a direct effect of the Ebola virus, which persisted in the eye fluid despite being cleared from most of the body, the researchers said. (Another place where Ebola can persist after recovery is in the semen.)
It’s reassuring that the Ebola virus was not found in parts of the eye that could come into contact with others, such as tears and the conjunctiva, the researchers said. This finding “supports previous studies suggesting that patients who recover from [Ebola virus disease] pose no risk of spreading the infection through casual contact,” the researchers said.
Future studies are needed to assess how the Ebola virus is able to persist in certain sites in the body, the researchers noted.
There are frightening implications for any declaration of recovery from a viral disease. If Ebola can linger in serological backwaters, what other diseases can do the same?
>>If Ebola can linger in serological backwaters,
>>what other diseases can do the same?
We don’t know, but we are going to find out.
Its back!
It seemed like the number of people contracting Ebola in West Africa was on the decline. But now, officials say that trend has stalled, with dozens of new cases of the deadly virus reported so far this month.
Last week, there were 31 new cases of Ebola reported in a growing geographic area in Guinea and Sierra Leone, the World Health Organization said. At the beginning of this week, 14 additional cases were reported.
The latest figures mark the second straight week that the number of Ebola cases in West Africa has increased, officials said.
Investigators are working to trace how the latest cases of the disease were contracted, the WHO said.
“The outbreak is not over and the response efforts must be sustained until we get to zero cases throughout the region and are able to stay at zero for several months,” the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response said Thursday.
Last month, officials from the WHO declared Liberia free of the disease. But even as they trumpeted the news, officials warned that outbreaks in Guinea and Sierra Leone ran the risk of bringing the virus back to Liberia, where more than 4,000 people died after contracting Ebola.
This is from the PFIF —
Sierra Leone imposes Ebola curfew for northern districts
http://www.sierraleonetimes.com/index.php/sid/23376154
13th June, 2015
Sierra Leone is introducing new curfews for two northern districts after a spike in new Ebola cases to the highest level in months, President Ernest Bai Koroma said on Friday. The 18-month-long Ebola epidemic has killed more than 11,100 people in West Africa, although weekly numbers of new cases have fallen sharply from last year’s peaks. One of the three worst-affected countries, Liberia, was declared Ebola-free in May. Sierra Leone and Guinea, however, are still regularly reporting several new cases daily, prompting both to extend emergency measures. “I have instructed the security to...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.