Ebola news 8/28

[Buster's Uncle]

Scientists dig into Ebola's deadly DNA for clues
Associated Press
By SETH BORENSTEIN  15 minutes ago



This undated handout photo provided by the journal Science shows Augustine Goba, laboratory director at Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. On Thursday, officials at the National Institutes of Health announced that they were launching safety trials on a preliminary vaccine for Ebola. Researchers have already checked that still-not-tested vaccine against some of the more than 350 mutations in this strain of Ebola to make sure the changes the disease is making won’t undercut science’s hurried efforts to fight it, said Pardis Sabeti, a scientist at Harvard University and its affiliated Broad Institute. She and Gire, also at Broad and Harvard, are two of the lead authors of a study published Thursday in the journal Science that maps the killer disease strain based on specimens collected from 78 patients. (AP Photo/Stephen Gire, Science)



WASHINGTON (AP) — A single funeral caused many.

Stephen Gire and other health researchers on the ground in Africa had some hope that the Ebola outbreak was coming under control or at least plateauing in late May. Then came the funeral of a healer in Guinea. More than a dozen of the mourners contracted the disease there, probably by washing or touching the body, and took it to Sierra Leone, according to a new DNA mapping of the Ebola virus that scientists hope will help them understand what makes this killer tick.

"You had this huge burst after it looked like the outbreak was starting to die down," Gire said. "It sort of threw a wrench in the response."

Ebola exploded after that funeral and has now killed at least 1,552 people in West Africa. It's probably more than that, with 40 percent of the cases in the last three weeks, according to the World Health Organization. WHO officials said Thursday the outbreak continues to accelerate and could reach more than 20,000 cases eventually.

Gire and more than 50 colleagues — five of whom died from Ebola while fighting the outbreak in Africa — have mapped the genetic code of this strain of Ebola, and in so doing showed how crucial that May funeral was. They hope to use that to track mutations that could become more worrisome the longer the outbreak lasts. This detailed genetic mapping also could eventually make a bit of a difference in the way doctors spot and fight the disease, especially with work in preliminary vaccines.

On Thursday, officials at the National Institutes of Health announced that they were launching safety trials on a preliminary vaccine for Ebola. Researchers have already checked that still-not-tested vaccine against some of the more than 350 mutations in this strain of Ebola to make sure the changes the disease is making won't undercut science's hurried efforts to fight it, said Pardis Sabeti, a scientist at Harvard University and its affiliated Broad Institute.

She and Gire, also at Broad and Harvard, are two of the lead authors of a study, published Thursday in the journal Science, that maps the killer disease strain based on specimens collected from 78 patients.



This undated handout photo provided by the journal Science shows Ebola surveillance at Kenema Governement Hospital is done by polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. On Thursday, officials at the National Institutes of Health announced that they were launching safety trials on a preliminary vaccine for Ebola. Researchers have already checked that still-not-tested vaccine against some of the more than 350 mutations in this strain of Ebola to make sure the changes the disease is making won’t undercut science’s hurried efforts to fight it, said Pardis Sabeti, a scientist at Harvard University and its affiliated Broad Institute. She and Gire, also at Broad and Harvard, are two of the lead authors of a study published Thursday in the journal Science that maps the killer disease strain based on specimens collected from 78 patients. (AP Photo/Stephen Gire, Science)


The virus has mutated more than 300 times from previous strains of Ebola, Gire said. Researchers have also pinpointed about 50 places in the genetic code where the virus has changed since this outbreak started. So far, they don't know what any of those mutations mean, but they hope to find out.

Gire said it is mutating in the faster side of the normal range for viruses of its type. That becomes worrisome because as time goes on and the disease spreads, it gives the strain more opportunity to mutate into something even harder to fight, perhaps making it stronger or easier to spread, Sabeti said. It could also mutate to make it weaker.

By putting the genetic underpinnings of this Ebola strain out in the public in a matter of days instead of the normal months or years, Sabeti hopes to rally researchers worldwide to look at the data, the changes in the disease, and find something that could help.

"We need to crowd source this outbreak response," Sabeti said. "I want high school students analyzing this sequence. You want people in every country working to do something."

Because this "phenomenally elegant study" is in real time, not years later, "it is worth its weight in whatever, gold, diamonds, platinum," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci wasn't part of the study, but his agency did help fund it.

This study is "terrific" and has academic and practical value, said Erica Ollmann Saphire, a Scripps Research Institute professor and co-director of the global virus network. Saphire, who wasn't part of the study, said companies that are trying to find therapies for people already infected, such as those that use antibodies that bind to current strains, need to carefully track how this strain mutates to make sure their treatment works as best it can.

Some have wondered if the virulence of this outbreak is due to some more dangerous strain of Ebola. When scientists pore over the mutations they'll have a better idea of the answer, but so far nothing jumps out that says this version of the disease is genetically worse than others; the spread more likely can be attributed to population, social conditions and other human factors, Gire said.

Saphire noted this strain's death rate seems to be a bit lower than previous outbreaks, but Sabeti said it's not that much different. The research team knows about the death toll first hand: Six of the 59 study authors have died, two in the past week, Sabeti said.
___

Online:

The journal Science: http://www.sciencemag.org


http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-dig-ebolas-deadly-dna-clues-183214070.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Scientists found the origins of the Ebola outbreak — by tracking its mutations
Vox
Updated by Susannah Locke on August 28, 2014, 2:00 p.m. ET@susannahlockesusannah@vox.com



Sierra Leone government burial team members wearing protective clothing carry the coffin of Dr Modupeh Cole, Sierra Leone's second senior physician to die of Ebola.  Carl De Souza/AFP/Getty Images 



One of the big mysteries in the Ebola outbreak   in West Africa is where the virus came from in the first place — and whether it's changed in any significant ways. These unanswered questions could be making it more difficult to diagnose the disease and find treatments.


A new analysis could help show if Ebola is changing over time


Now scientists are starting to get some answers. In a new paper in Science, researchers reveal that they have sequenced the genomes of Ebola from 78 patients in Sierra Leone who contracted the disease in May and June. Those sequences revealed some 300 mutations specific to this outbreak.

The new analysis could help determine if the virus' behavior has changed — and provide information for future diagnostic tests and treatments.

Among their findings, the researchers discovered that the current viral strains come from a related strain that left Central Africa within the past ten years. And the research confirms that the virus likely spread into Sierra Leone when women became infected after attending the funeral of a traditional healer who had been treating Guinean Ebola patients.

The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the worst on record. It has hit four countries, including Sierra Leone, infected approximately 3,000, and killed about 1,500 people. And so far, there is no sign of it slowing down.

The fact that the researchers were able to sequence the Ebola genomes in mere months is remarkable — a contrast to the typically slow pace of scientific research. "We’re trying to do this as fast as possible," says co-senior author Pardis Sabeti, a biologist at MIT and Harvard. This new data increases the number of public Ebola virus sequences fourfold.

The main impact of the paper will be as the foundation of research for years to come as other projects try to sort out what all of these genetic sequences — and their hundreds of mutations — really mean.

The paper is also a sad reminder of the toll that the virus has taken on those working on the front lines. Five of the authors died of Ebola before it was published. All were affiliated with Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone.


What genetic sequences can tell us about Ebola


Ebola tree lineage  (Gire, SK, et al. Science, August 28, 2014.)


Viruses randomly mutate over time. This is completely normal for viruses, and there's no reason to think that Ebola's mutation rate is anything weird or unusual.


Scientists can use mutations as markers TO track where Ebola has traveled AND WHEN


Scientists can use these mutations as markers to piece together how the Ebola virus has traveled from person to person. Because they know the general mutation rate of the virus, they can also pin down the dates of when the disease spread.

So what has this analysis revealed? Using genetic sequences from current and previous outbreaks, the researchers mapped out a family tree that puts a common ancestor of the recent West African outbreak someplace in Central Africa roughly around 2004. This contradicts an earlier hypothesis that the virus had been hanging around West Africa for much longer than that.

The data, on the whole, supports what epidemiologists have already deduced about how the virus spread into Sierra Leone. More than a dozen women became infected after attending the funeral of a traditional healer who had been treating Guinean Ebola patients and contracted the disease.

One surprise from the paper is that two different strains of Ebola came out of that funeral. This suggests that either the healer was infected with two different strains or that another person at the funeral was already infected.

As Ebola then traveled across Sierra Leone, a third strain of the virus appeared.


Why having Ebola gene sequences is helpful

Some Ebola diagnostic tests have been designed to detect areas that have mutated in the Ebola virus samples from this outbreak, raising the possibility these tests might be losing accuracy. One of the things Sabeti plans to do next is test whether that's actually the case.


Diagnosing Ebola is more difficult than it sounds


Diagnosing Ebola can actually be more difficult than it might sound. The disease often looks like a lot of other feverish illnesses that can be common. And at a later stage, only some patients end up bleeding.

However, it's essential to know who has it as soon as possible, especially so that health-care workers can use appropriate procedures to prevent transmission to themselves and others. So accurate diagnostic tests are absolutely needed.

Researchers are also planning to study the mutations to see if any of them are affecting Ebola's recent behavior. The number of mutations found is completely normal, and it isn't necessarily the case that they'll have a big effect. But it's possible that something intriguing could turn up.

For example, this outbreak has had a higher transmission rate and lower death rate than others, and researchers are curious if any of these mutations are related to that. (Right now, social factors are thought to be the main causes of these two changes.)

"It sets the stage for the next few years of research that will reveal the differences between this virus and previous versions of Ebola virus," says Erica Ollmann Saphire, who researches Ebola and similar viruses at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

"My laboratory will be using this sequence information to understand the molecular effects of these mutations," she says. "We will also be looking at our pool of antibody therapeutics beyond ZMapp to ensure that candidate cocktails are optimally effective against these circulating strains."

Those working on other long-term projects involving vaccines should also find this information helpful.


The longer Ebola circulates, the more opportunities it has to change — possibly for the worse

Although Ebola's mutation rate itself isn't anything unusual, the longer it's circulating in people, the more chances it will have to randomly come up with a mutation that it will find beneficial — possibly to the detriment of human health.

"You never want to give a virus that kind of opportunity," Sabeti says. "We hope that this work opens up new doors for more people to work together to stop this virus now."


http://www.vox.com/2014/8/28/6071071/ebola-sequencing

[Buster's Uncle]

World Food Programme boosts operations to Ebola-hit W.Africa
AFP
By Selim Saheb Ettaba  3 hours ago



Dakar (AFP) - The World Food Programme is planning to boost its emergency aid in the west of Africa, saying the region faces a "tsunami" of need caused by the Ebola outbreak.

"We know how to do conflict, we know how to do earthquakes and we know how to do tsunamis. This is like a tsunami that is already at its peak," said Denise Brown, the WFP's regional director for west Africa.

Speaking in Dakar after returning from Liberia and Sierra Leone -- the countries most seriously affected by the outbreak -- she said there was a "need to scale up" to ensure that air access, materials, body bags, and food were reaching those most in need.

"What we saw when we were there is that the health structures are massively overwhelmed."

She said the WFP has "never responded in this scale to this kind of crisis" before, with the added complication that many areas -- such as the vast West Point slum in Liberia's capital Monrovia -- are quarantined, cutting off access to food.

The latest WHO death toll, released on Thursday, showed there had been another rise in new cases and fatalities, with more than 1,500 people now believed to have died in west Africa's worst ever outbreak of the virus.

The figures say that 3,062 people have caught this deadly form of haemorrhagic fever to date, and the WHO warned the number of cases could exceed 20,000 before the outbreak is stemmed.

Brown said the organisation already has one aircraft helping in the region but that a larger, faster plane, and several helicopters are currently being prepared for deployment.

The WFP has 50 additional specialised staff, including air and logistics experts, it hopes will soon be working in the region, and a $28 million (21 million euros) air reserve it can use until the end of the year.

She suggested the closure of borders and flight bans were having an impact on the area, and said that food prices had risen by 30 percent in Liberia and Sierra Leone according to a provisional analysis.


http://news.yahoo.com/world-food-programme-boosts-operations-ebola-hit-w-194937911.html

[Buster's Uncle]

IMF says Ebola having 'acute' impact on West African economies
Reuters
6 hours ago



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The worst ever outbreak of the Ebola disease is likely to lead to sharply lower growth in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and raise financing needs in all three West African countries, an IMF spokesman said on Thursday.

At least 1,500 people have died of the deadly hemorrhagic virus since it was detected in the remote jungles of southeast Guinea in March and spread quickly to neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone. Five people have also died in Nigeria.

"The Ebola outbreak is having an acute macroeconomic and social impact on three already fragile countries in West Africa," IMF spokesman Gerry Rice told reporters.

"We are actively working with all three countries to prepare a preliminary economic assessment of the impact of the Ebola crisis, and additional financing support that may be required."

All three countries are already getting IMF loans under the extended credit facility, a longer-term IMF program available for poor countries with protracted balance of payments problems.

Guinea has a three-year, $200 million IMF program, Liberia is getting about $80 million over three years, and Sierra Leone has a three-year IMF program of about $96 million.

(Reporting by Anna Yukhananov; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)


http://news.yahoo.com/imf-says-ebola-having-acute-impact-west-african-144222540--sector.html

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UN: Ebola disease caseload could reach 20,000
Associated Press
By JOHN HEILPRIN and KRISTA LARSON  3 hours ago



The number of people affected by the Ebola virus could rise to 20,000 within nine months, the World Health Organization said Thursday. Photo: Getty Images



GENEVA (AP) — The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is accelerating and could grow six times larger to infect as many as 20,000 people, the World Health Organization said Thursday. The U.N. health agency unveiled a new road map for containing the virus, and scientists are fast-tracking efforts to find a treatment or vaccine.

Ebola has menaced Africa for 40 years, but previously struck in remote villages and was contained fairly quickly. This time, it has spread to major cities in four countries, provoking unrest as whole neighborhoods and towns have been sealed to the outside.

An experimental vaccine developed by the U.S. government and GlaxoSmithKline will be tested on humans starting next week, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced Thursday. The NIH trial will use healthy adult volunteers in Maryland, and British experts will simultaneously test the same vaccine in healthy people in the U.K., Gambia and Mali.

Preliminary results on the vaccine's safety — not its effectiveness — could be available in months.

Scientists also announced that they have mapped the genetic code of this strain of Ebola to better understand how it kills. In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers traced an explosion of cases in this outbreak to a single funeral in Guinea in May.

They hope to use DNA mapping to track mutations that could become more worrisome the longer the outbreak lasts, and make a difference in the how doctors spot and fight the disease as vaccines are developed.



People stand on the shoreline near a sign reading 'NO DUMPING', amongst rubbish at West Point, a area heavily effected by the Ebola virus, with residence not being allowed to leave West Point, as government forces clamp down on movement to prevent the spread of Ebola, in Monrovia, Liberia, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014. Health officials in Liberia said the other two recipients of ZMapp in Liberia — a Congolese doctor and a Liberian physician's assistant, have recovered. Both are expected to be discharged from an Ebola treatment center on Friday, said Dr. Moses Massaquoi, a Liberian doctor with the treatment team. (AP Photo/Abbas Dulleh)


The outbreak has now killed at least 1,552 people among 3,069 reported cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria, and the real caseload in urban areas could be two to four times higher. Meanwhile, an entirely separate Ebola outbreak has killed 13 of 42 people sickened in a remote area of Congo, in Central Africa, the agency said.

With about a 50 percent mortality rate among those known to be infected, the overall death toll could reach 10,000 in the worst-case scenario.

"I think that's completely unacceptable," said the agency's emergency operations director, Dr. Bruce Aylward.

The WHO's new plan would cost $489 million to support 750 international health workers and 12,000 national ones. It aims to:

— stop Ebola transmission in affected countries within six to nine months



People gather next to a sign reading 'NO DUMPING' amongst rubbish at West Point, an area that has been hit hard by the Ebola virus, with local residents not allowed to leave the West Point area, as government forces clamp down on movement to prevent the spread of Ebola, in Monrovia, Liberia, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014. Health officials in Liberia said the other two recipients of ZMapp in Liberia, a Congolese doctor and a Liberian physician's assistant, have recovered. Both are expected to be discharged from an Ebola treatment center on Friday, said Dr. Moses Massaquoi, a Liberian doctor with the treatment team.(AP Photo/Abbas Dulleh)


— prevent the spread of any new infections within eight weeks of a case being identified anywhere in the world

— and improve the public health responses to Ebola in any nation with major transportation hubs or borders shared with affected countries.

With the world's support, medical workers hope to take "the heat out of this outbreak" within three months, Aylward said.

The U.N. agency's announcement was immediately criticized by Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity running many of the treatment centers in West Africa.

"The WHO road map is welcome, but it should not give a false sense of hope. A plan needs to be acted upon. Huge questions remain," the charity's operations director, Bruce de le Vingne, said in a statement. "States with the capacity to help have the responsibility to mobilize resources to the affected countries, rather than watching from the sidelines with a naive hope that the situation will improve."



Liberian soldiers patrol the seaside of West Point by boat, an area that has been hit hard by the Ebola virus, with local residents not allowed to leave the West Point area, as government forces clamp down on movement to prevent the spread of Ebola, in Monrovia, Liberia, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014. Health officials in Liberia said the other two recipients of ZMapp in Liberia, a Congolese doctor and a Liberian physician's assistant, have recovered. Both are expected to be discharged from an Ebola treatment center on Friday, said Dr. Moses Massaquoi, a Liberian doctor with the treatment team. (AP Photo/Abbas Dulleh)


Containment is key, but it has to be done carefully, in ways that don't cause panic or hamper the response, the agency said.

The WHO has supported the quarantine of sick people, and said cordoning off entire neighborhoods can be useful, as long as civil rights are respected. But it has called on airlines to resume flights to affected countries, since Ebola is unlikely to spread through air travel. Health checks at airports should provide sufficient protection while still enabling humanitarian workers to get in.

"Right now there is a super risk of the response effort being choked off, being restricted, because we simply cannot get enough seats on enough airplanes to get people in and out, and rotating, to get goods and supplies in and out and rotating," Aylward said.

Ebola and the measures used to control it are making it harder for some of the world's poorest people to feed themselves and seek medical care. Many thousands of people have been cut off from markets; food prices have soared and farmers are separated from their fields. People now fearing hospitals are going without treatment for other diseases, like malaria, which kills around 600,000 each year, 90 percent of them in Africa.

The World Food Program says it needs $70 million immediately to help feed 1.3 million people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the coming months because control measures have threatened food supplies.

Nigerian authorities, meanwhile, confirmed their first fatality outside the commercial capital of Lagos, where a dying Liberian-American airline passenger infected others in late July. They said a man sickened after coming into contact with the passenger had evaded surveillance and infected a doctor in southern Nigeria, who later died.

---

Larson reported from Dakar, Senegal. Seth Borenstein in Washington; Bashir Adigun in Abuja, Nigeria; Sarah DiLorenzo in Dakar; and Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.


http://news.yahoo.com/nigeria-ebola-patient-hid-government-084052338.html

[Buster's Uncle]

WHO sounds alarm over Ebola infections as deaths top 1,500
AFP
By Chris Stein with Ola Awoniyi in Abuja and Jonathan Fowler in Geneva  2 hours ago



The World Health Organization said today the number of fatalities from the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa has risen to more than 1,500.



Accra (AFP) - The World Health Organization said on Thursday that the number of Ebola cases was increasing rapidly and could exceed 20,000 before the virus is brought under control, as the death toll topped 1,500.

New figures showed the massive scale of the crisis, which the WHO said indicated a "rapid increase still in the intensity of transmission" that could cost at least $490 million (370 million euros) to tackle.

Bruce Aylward, the WHO's head of emergency programmes, said it could take six to nine months to bring Ebola under control, by which time the number of infections could have passed 20,000.

"That's not saying we expect 20,000, that's not saying we would accept, more importantly, 20,000 cases," he told reporters in Geneva, calling the situation a "global health security issue".

"But we have got to have a system that is robust enough to deal with... a very bad case scenario."

As of August 26, 1,552 people had been confirmed dead from Ebola in four countries -- Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria -- while 3,062 had been infected.



A medical worker wears a protective suit at Biankouma hospital, Ivory Coast, on August 14, 2014 (AFP Photo/Issouf Sanogo)


Liberia was the worst affected with 694 deaths; 422 people have died in Sierra Leone; and 430 in Guinea, where the virus emerged at the start of the year. Nigeria has now recorded six deaths.

But Aylward warned that the actual caseload could be "two to four times higher than the number of cases you see reported".

Nigeria's latest death -- in the southeastern oil city of Port Harcourt -- was the first outside its biggest city, Lagos, and dashed hopes that the country had successfully contained the virus.

Scientists meanwhile said the first human trials of a potential vaccine will start next week using a product known as the NIAID/GSK Ebola vaccine candidate made by pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline and the US government.



Nigeria's Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu speaks on the Ebola outbreak in Abuja on May 8, 2014 (AFP Photo/Pius Utomi Ekpei)


- Countries 'stigmatised' -

Health ministers from member states of the West African regional bloc ECOWAS met on Thursday in the Ghanaian capital Accra and vowed to strengthen their response to the devastating outbreak.

Ghana's President John Mahama, the current ECOWAS chairman, complained security measures taken by other countries to prevent the virus spreading, including travel bans, had unfairly hit member states.

"Currently in the sub-region, Ebola is officially reported in four countries and yet the entire West African sub-region of 15 nations and even Africa as a whole of 54 nations has been stigmatised," he said.

The bloc called for travel bans to be overturned and borders reopened.

The International Monetary Fund said it was studying additional financial support for Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia because of the "acute macroeconomic and social impact" on their already weak economies.



An airport security officer, wearing a face mask and hand gloves, searches a passenger at Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos on August 11, 2014 (AFP Photo/Pius Utomi Ekpei)


"Significant financing needs are likely to arise," it added.

In Nigeria, Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said a doctor who treated a contact of the Liberian-American man who brought Ebola into the country died on August 22.

The patient, an ECOWAS official, slipped through the net and travelled to Port Harcourt where he saw the doctor in a hotel room after feeling unwell, Chukwu said in Abuja.

Port Harcourt, 435 kilometres (270 miles) east of Lagos and the capital of Rivers state, is the centre of Nigeria's oil industry and a base for several international companies, including Anglo-Dutch giant Shell, US firm Chevron and France's Total.

Shell and Total said they were both monitoring the situation closely and keeping staff informed of health advice. Operations have not yet been affected.



A picture taken on August 25, 2014 in Monrovia shows nurses wearing a protective suit escorting a man infected with the Ebola virus to a hospital in Monrovia (AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso)


- Emergency response hit -

The director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom Frieden, said on Wednesday "urgent action" was needed to tackle Ebola and warned the situation would get worse before it got better.

There has been mounting concern about the effect of the most lethal outbreak of the tropical virus in history.

A number of airlines, including Air France and British Airways, have suspended their services to Freetown and Monrovia, leading to complaints that Ebola-hit countries were being increasingly isolated.

The WHO's Aylward said it was "absolutely vital" that airlines resume flights because it was hindering the emergency response. A travel ban was "a self-defeating strategy", he added.

On an Ebola vaccine, researchers also said they hoped safety trials on 140 healthy volunteers in Britain, Gambia and Mali could start next month and finish by the end of the year, with scope for GSK to make some 10,000 extra doses.

A number of foreign healthcare workers who contracted Ebola have been given an experimental therapy called ZMapp but stocks are exhausted.


http://news.yahoo.com/fresh-ebola-warning-regional-crisis-talks-start-ghana-090645185.html

[Buster's Uncle]

CDC worker flown home to US over Ebola concerns
Associated Press
By JEFF MARTIN  8 hours ago



ATLANTA (AP) — A CDC staff member who worked in close proximity to someone infected by the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa has been flown by charter jet back home to Atlanta to monitor potential symptoms, officials said Thursday.

The staffer had "low-risk" contact with someone who later tested positive for the virus in Sierra Leone, said Tom Skinner, a spokesman at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control.

"The worker is not sick, not showing symptoms, not showing any signs of illness whatsoever," Skinner said.

The staffer worked within three feet of the ill international health worker in the same room for a prolonged period of time, according to a CDC statement. The staffer practiced "good personal infection control," according to the CDC. The agency did not identify the worker.

The CDC staffer arrived in Atlanta on Wednesday and is at home, Skinner said. The worker is expected to check for fever twice each day for 21 days as a precaution, Skinner said.

A specially-equipped jet that was used to transport American aid workers Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly to Atlanta after they tested positive for Ebola was not used for the CDC staffer, Skinner said. Instead, he said, the staffed flew on a more standard charter plane. Writebol and Brantly were released from Emory University Hospital this month.

The World Health Organization said Thursday that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa eventually could exceed 20,000 cases, more than six times as many as are now known.

To fight the outbreak, more than 60 CDC personnel are in the region, though the numbers fluctuate as staffers rotate in and out of hard-hit areas, according to the agency.


http://news.yahoo.com/cdc-worker-flown-home-us-over-ebola-concerns-141426634.html

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WHO says Ebola outbreak could strike 20,000 people
Reuters
By Stephanie Nebehay  14 hours ago



GENEVA (Reuters) - The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa could infect more than 20,000 people, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday in a bleak assessment of the deadly disease.

The United Nations health agency issued a strategic plan to combat the outbreak in four West African nations where it said the actual number of cases could already be two to four times higher than the reported 3,069. The death toll stands at 1,552.

"This roadmap assumes that in many areas of intense transmission the actual number of cases may be 2-4 fold higher than that currently reported. It acknowledges that the aggregate case load of Ebola Virus Disease could exceed 20,000 over the course of this emergency," the WHO said.

The deadly outbreak that began in Guinea in March and has spread to neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone as well as to Nigeria requires a massive and coordinated international response, the WHO said.

A separate outbreak of Ebola in Democratic Republic of Congo identified as a different strain, is not included in its toll.

"Response activities must be adapted in areas of very intense transmission and particular attention must be given to stopping transmission in capital cities and major ports, thereby facilitating the larger response and relief effort," the WHO said.

The virus is still being spread in a "substantial number of localities", aggravating fragile social and economic conditions and has already killed an unprecedented number of health workers, the agency said.

A wider U.N.-led plan being launched by the end of September is "expected to underpin support for the increasingly acute problems associated with food security, protection, water, sanitation and hygiene, primary and secondary health care and education, as well as the longer-term recovery effort that will be needed," the WHO said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Hugh Lawson)


http://news.yahoo.com/says-ebola-outbreak-could-strike-20-000-people-100446926.html

[Buster's Uncle]

UN: Ebola disease caseload could reach 20,000
Associated Press
By JOHN HEILPRIN and KRISTA LARSON  37 minutes ago



The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is accelerating and could grow six times larger to infect as many as 20,000 people, the World Health Organization said Thursday. The U.N. health agency unveiled a new road map for containing the virus, and scientists are fast-tracking efforts to find a treatment or vaccine.

Ebola has menaced Africa for 40 years, but previously struck in remote villages and was contained fairly quickly. This time, it has spread to major cities in four countries, provoking unrest as whole neighborhoods and towns have been sealed to the outside.

An experimental vaccine developed by the U.S. government and GlaxoSmithKline will be tested on humans starting next week, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced Thursday. The NIH trial will use healthy adult volunteers in Maryland, and British experts will simultaneously test the same vaccine in healthy people in the U.K., Gambia and Mali.

Preliminary results on the vaccine's safety — not its effectiveness — could be available in months.

Scientists also announced that they have mapped the genetic code of this strain of Ebola to better understand how it kills. In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers traced an explosion of cases in this outbreak to a single funeral in Guinea in May.

They hope to use DNA mapping to track mutations that could become more worrisome the longer the outbreak lasts, and make a difference in the how doctors spot and fight the disease as vaccines are developed.

The outbreak has now killed at least 1,552 people among 3,069 reported cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria, and the real caseload in urban areas could be two to four times higher. Meanwhile, an entirely separate Ebola outbreak has killed 13 of 42 people sickened in a remote area of Congo, in Central Africa, the agency said.

With about a 50 percent mortality rate among those known to be infected, the overall death toll could reach 10,000 in the worst-case scenario.

"I think that's completely unacceptable," said the agency's emergency operations director, Dr. Bruce Aylward.

The WHO's new plan would cost $489 million to support 750 international health workers and 12,000 national ones. It aims to:

— stop Ebola transmission in affected countries within six to nine months

— prevent the spread of any new infections within eight weeks of a case being identified anywhere in the world

— and improve the public health responses to Ebola in any nation with major transportation hubs or borders shared with affected countries.

With the world's support, medical workers hope to take "the heat out of this outbreak" within three months, Aylward said.

The U.N. agency's announcement was immediately criticized by Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity running many of the treatment centers in West Africa.

"The WHO road map is welcome, but it should not give a false sense of hope. A plan needs to be acted upon. Huge questions remain," the charity's operations director, Bruce de le Vingne, said in a statement. "States with the capacity to help have the responsibility to mobilize resources to the affected countries, rather than watching from the sidelines with a naive hope that the situation will improve."

Containment is key, but it has to be done carefully, in ways that don't cause panic or hamper the response, the agency said.

The WHO has supported the quarantine of sick people, and said cordoning off entire neighborhoods can be useful, as long as civil rights are respected. But it has called on airlines to resume flights to affected countries, since Ebola is unlikely to spread through air travel. Health checks at airports should provide sufficient protection while still enabling humanitarian workers to get in.

"Right now there is a super risk of the response effort being choked off, being restricted, because we simply cannot get enough seats on enough airplanes to get people in and out, and rotating, to get goods and supplies in and out and rotating," Aylward said.

Ebola and the measures used to control it are making it harder for some of the world's poorest people to feed themselves and seek medical care. Many thousands of people have been cut off from markets; food prices have soared and farmers are separated from their fields. People now fearing hospitals are going without treatment for other diseases, like malaria, which kills around 600,000 each year, 90 percent of them in Africa.

The World Food Program says it needs $70 million immediately to help feed 1.3 million people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the coming months because control measures have threatened food supplies.

Nigerian authorities, meanwhile, confirmed their first fatality outside the commercial capital of Lagos, where a dying Liberian-American airline passenger infected others in late July. They said a man sickened after coming into contact with the passenger had evaded surveillance and infected a doctor in southern Nigeria, who later died.

---

Larson reported from Dakar, Senegal. Seth Borenstein in Washington; Bashir Adigun in Abuja, Nigeria; Sarah DiLorenzo in Dakar; and Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.


http://news.yahoo.com/nigeria-ebola-patient-hid-government-084052338.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Gene studies of Ebola in Sierra Leone show virus is mutating fast
Reuters
7 hours ago



CHICAGO, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Genetic studies of some of the earliest Ebola cases in Sierra Leone reveal more than 300 genetic changes in the virus as it leapt from person to person, changes that could blunt the effectiveness of diagnostic tests and experimental treatments now in development, researchers said on Thursday.

"We found the virus is doing what viruses do. It's mutating," said Pardis Sabeti of Harvard University and the Broad Institute, who led the massive study of samples from 78 people in Sierra Leone, all of whose infections could be traced to a faith healer whose claims of a cure attracted Ebola patients from Guinea, where the virus first took hold.

The findings, published in Science, suggest the virus is mutating quickly and in ways that could affect current diagnostics and future vaccines and treatments, such as GlaxoSmithKline's Ebola vaccine, which was just fast-tracked to begin clinical trials, or the antibody drug ZMapp, being developed by California biotech Mapp Biopharmaceutical.

The findings come as the World Health Organization said that the epidemic could infect more than 20,000 people and spread to more countries. A WHO representative could not immediately be reached for comment on the latest genetic study.

Study coauthor Robert Garry of Tulane University said the virus is mutating at twice the rate in people as it was in animal hosts, such as fruit bats.

Garry said the study has shown changes in the glycoprotein, the surface protein that binds the virus to human cells, allowing it to start replicating in its human host. "It's also what your immune system will recognize," he said.

In an unusual step, the researchers posted the sequences online as soon as they became available, giving other researchers early access to the data.

Erica Ollmann Saphire of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, has already checked the data to see if it impacts the three antibodies in ZMapp, a drug in short supply that has been tried on several individuals, including the two U.S. missionaries who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone and who have since recovered.

"It appears that they do not (affect ZMapp)," said Saphire, who directs a consortium to develop antibody treatments for Ebola and related viruses. But she said the data "will be critical to seeing if any of the other antibodies in our pool could be affected."

Saphire said the speed with which Sabeti and colleagues mapped genetic changes in the virus gives researchers information that "will also be critical" to companies developing RNA-based therapeutics.

That could impact treatments under way from Vancouver-based Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp and privately held Profectus BioSciences of Tarrytown, New York.

Part of what makes the data useful is the precise picture it paints as the epidemic unfolded. Sabeti credits years of work by her lab, colleagues at Tulane and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation in developing a response network for Lassa fever, a virus similar to Ebola that is endemic in West Africa.

Several of the study authors gave their lives to the work, including Dr Sheik Humarr Khan, the beloved "hero" doctor from the Kenema Government Hospital, who died from Ebola.

The team had been doing surveillance for two months when the first case of Ebola arrived from Guinea on May 25. That case involved a "sowei" or tribal healer, whose claim of a cure lured sick Ebola victims from nearby Guinea.

"When she contracted Ebola and died, there were a lot of people who came to her funeral," Garry said. One of these was a young pregnant woman who became infected and traveled to Kenema Government Hospital, where she was diagnosed with Ebola.

With the Lassa surveillance team in place, they quickly began testing samples.

"We've been able to capture the initial spread from that one person and to follow all of these contacts and everything with sequencing," Garry said.

The team used a technique called deep sequencing in which sequences are done repeatedly to generate highly specific results, allowing them to see not only how the virus is mutating from person to person, but how it is mutating in cells within the same person.

What is not clear from the study is whether the mutations are fueling the epidemic by allowing the virus to grow better in people and become easier to spread. That will require further tests in the lab, Garry said.

(Editing by Matthew Lewis)


http://news.yahoo.com/gene-studies-ebola-sierra-leone-185351462.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Ebola Outbreak in Sierra Leone Began at a Funeral
LiveScience.com
By Bahar Gholipour, Staff Writer  2 hours ago



A microscopic view of the Ebola virus.



An extensive look at the genome of the Ebola virus reveals its behavior, when it arrived in West Africa and how it spread in the region to cause the largest-ever recorded Ebola outbreak.

Researchers sequenced 99 Ebola virus genomes from 78 patients in Sierra Leone, one of the countries affected by the outbreak that started in the neighboring Guinea, and found that the virus' genome changes quickly, including parts of the genome that are crucial for diagnostic tests to work.

"We've uncovered more than 300 genetic clues about what sets this outbreak apart from previous outbreaks," co-author Stephen Gire of Harvard said in a statement.

The first Ebola patient in Sierra Leone was identified in May. Investigations by the country's ministry of health traced the infection back to the funeral of a traditional healer who treated Ebola patients across the border in Guinea. The investigators found 13 additional cases of Ebola, all in women who attended the burial.

The researchers studied the viruses isolated from the blood of these patients, as well as subsequent Ebola patients, to identify the genetic characteristics of the Ebola virus responsible for this outbreak.

"Understanding how a virus is changing is critical knowledge for the development of diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics, as they usually target specific parts of the viral genome that might change both between and within outbreaks," co-authors Kristian Andersen and Daniel Park of Harvard University told Live Science.

The findings suggest that the virus was brought to the region within the past decade, likely by an infected bat traveling from Central Africa. Earlier work had suggested the virus was circulating in animals in West Africa for several decades without having been detected.

The virus seems to have made a single jump from an animal to a person, and from there continued its journey through human-to-human transmission, the researchers said. This means that the current outbreak, at least in Sierra Leone, is not being fed by new transmissions from animals, in contrast to some previous Ebola outbreaks, which grew partly because of people's continuous exposure to infected animals.

This finding can guide decisions on whether to focus on human-to-human spread of the virus or on minimizing contact with animals, for example, by banning the consumption of bushmeat, the researchers said.

The study was published today (Aug. 28) in the journal Science.

Sierra Leone outbreak was traced to a funeral at the border

So far in the Ebola outbreak, 3,069 suspected and confirmed cases of infection and 1,552 deaths have been reported, according to the World Health Organization. The outbreak started in February 2014 in Guinea and then spread to Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

The new study revealed that those first Ebola patients at the funeral were, in fact, infected by two distinct viruses.

"The thing that was most surprising was that two genetically different viruses were introduced into Sierra Leone at the same time, and likely through one event at a funeral," the researchers told Live Science.

Researchers were able to retrospectively look for the disease in blood samples and trace the trajectory of the virus because they were on the watch for another deadly disease, Lassa fever, said co-author Augustine Goba, director of the Lassa Laboratory at the Kenema Government Hospital. Goba was the doctor who identified the first Ebola case in Sierra Leone.

"We could thus identify cases and trace the Ebola virus spread as soon as it entered our country," Goba said.

Nearly 60 co-authors from several countries helped collect samples and analyze the genome of the virus. Five of them contracted Ebola in the course of their work in the epicenters of the outbreak and died from the disease before the publication of the study.

"There is an extraordinary battle still ahead, and we have lost many friends and colleagues already, like our good friend and colleague Dr. Humarr Khan, a co-senior author here," said co-senior author Pardis Sabeti, an associate professor at Harvard.

There are no vaccines to prevent infection with Ebola virus or drugs to cure the disease. An experimental treatment based on antibodies, called ZMapp, has shown promise in monkeys but it's unclear whether the drug is also effective in treating people.


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-outbreak-sierra-leone-began-funeral-233656855.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Ebola virus sequences may aid hunt for treatments
AFP
By Kerry Sheridan  5 hours ago



Health workers take off their protective suits after disinfecting areas of the Pita hospital on August 25, 2014, in Guinea (AFP Photo/Cellou Binani)



Washington (AFP) - Scientists tracking the spread of Ebola across West Africa released Thursday 99 sequenced genomes of the deadly and highly contagious hemorrhagic virus in the hopes the data may accelerate diagnosis and treatment.

As a sign of the urgency and danger at hand, five of the nearly 60 international co-authors who helped collect and analyze the viral samples have died of Ebola already this year, said the report in the journal Science.

More than 1,552 people have been killed and 3,000 infected in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria, according to the World Health Organization's latest toll.

Never before has there been an Ebola outbreak so large, nor has the virus -- which was first detected in 1976 -- ever infected people in West Africa until now.

"We've uncovered more than 300 genetic clues about what sets this outbreak apart from previous outbreaks," said Stephen Gire, a research scientist in the Sabeti lab at the Broad Institute and Harvard University.

"Although we don't know whether these differences are related to the severity of the current outbreak, by sharing these data with the research community we hope to speed up our understanding of this epidemic and support global efforts to contain it."


- How the virus spreads -

Ebola spreads through close contact with the bodily fluids of infected people when they are showing symptoms, such as fever, vomiting and diarrhea.

It can also be contagious after a person dies, and health officials have warned that touching corpses during funeral rites can be a key route of transmission.

West Africa's outbreak began in Guinea early this year, then spread to Liberia in March, Sierra Leone in May, and Nigeria in late July.

Researchers took samples of the virus from 78 patients in Sierra Leone during the first few weeks of the outbreak there.

They released 99 sequences, because they sampled some of the patients twice to show how the virus could evolve in a single person.

Scientists focused some of their study on a group of 12 people who were infected in Sierra Leone while attending the funeral of a traditional healer who had come into contact with Ebola patients from Guinea.

Their story was first told to an AFP reporter in Kenema, Sierra Leone last week.

Samples taken from the 12 funeral attendees show that the Sierra Leone outbreak stemmed from two genetically distinct viruses circulating in Guinea at the time, the Science report found.

This suggests "the funeral attendees were most likely infected by two lineages then circulating in Guinea, possibly at the funeral."

The mourners included a young pregnant woman. Soon after, she was hospitalized with a fever and miscarried, Science said.

She survived, and became Sierra Leone's first confirmed case of Ebola in the outbreak that swept West Africa.


- Animal host? -

Researchers said they believe the virus spreads via an animal host, possibly a kind of fruit bat that has a natural range from central Africa -- where Ebola has caused human outbreaks before -- to Guinea in the continent's far west.

A report in The New England Journal of Medicine in April said the first known case of the West Africa outbreak was believed to be a young child who died December 6, 2013 in Guinea.

Some researchers believe the child may have come into contact with an infected fruit bat, though that theory has not been proven.

There is no drug or vaccine on the market to treat or prevent Ebola.

The first human trials of a potential vaccine are set to begin near the US capital next week.


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-virus-sequences-may-aid-hunt-treatments-205001104.html