Ebola News 1/13

[Buster's Uncle]

CDC director 'confident' world can get to zero Ebola cases
Reuters  1 hour ago



In this Oct. 12, 2014, file photo, Dr. Tom Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks at a news conference in Atlanta.  (AP Photo/John Amis, File)



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday he was "confident" that the Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa can be brought under control, but that "we are by no means out of the woods."

Speaking at a breakfast meeting in Washington with public health officials and lawmakers, Dr. Tom Frieden said it is vital that every case of the disease is eliminated.

"I remain very confident we can get to zero cases in this epidemic if we continue the way we're going and nothing unexpected happens," he said.

While Frieden said he has seen "amazing" improvement in attempts to battle the disease, he said the recovery is patchy and fragile and that it will remain so until every case has been eradicated.

"The largest, biggest risk is that it continues to fester and continues to spread at a low rate, which means it could flare up at any time," he said. "We have to get to zero and then stay at zero and that's going to require monitoring, surveillance."

The Ebola epidemic has killed some 8,371 out of an estimated 21,171 known cases of people infected in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea alone, according to the latest available figures from the World Health Organization.

Jeremy Konyndyk, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance said improvements are occurring at varying rates in different countries.

The number of new cases in Liberia have dropped from more than 30 a day to the single-digits, Konyndyk said. Sierra Leone is also beginning to turn the corner, though cases remain widespread.

The most troubling country, however, remains Guinea, partly due to community resistance to efforts to combat the disease.

"We have been working hard to identify additional people to go to Guinea," Frieden said.

While confident the present epidemic can be controlled, Frieden emphasized the need for improvements in health infrastructure in the region.

"We need those robust national systems," he said. "Ebola is somewhat off the headlines in the U.S., but it remains a terrible problem in West Africa."

(Reporting by Toni Clarke; Editing by Doina Chiacu and G Crosse)


http://news.yahoo.com/cdc-director-confident-zero-ebola-cases-144259705--sector.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Liberia says limits Ebola spread to just two counties
Reuters  1 hour ago



Pedestrians walk past a sign reading "Ebola disease outbreak" outside the Ministry of Finance in Monrovia January 12, 2015. REUTERS/James Giahyue



MONROVIA (Reuters) - Liberia is on the verge of containing the spread of the Ebola virus with only two of its 15 counties reporting new infections, the head of the country's Ebola response said on Tuesday.

Tolbert Nyenswah, who is also a deputy health minister, said the new cases were reported in Montserrado county, which includes the capital Monrovia, and Grand Cape Mount, on the border with Sierra Leone.

Bong, Nimba, Sinoe, and Margibi counties have not reported a single case since the end of December, he said. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Bong, Nimba and Sinoe have gone 21 days without a positive case - the maximum incubation period for the virus.

"If we can go at this rate ... and maintain this trend, we will advance to zero for the entire country soonest," Nyenswah said, without setting a specific date.

Liberian officials had previously set a December 31 target for zero new infections. The rate of Ebola transmission has slowed in recent weeks in Liberia, one of the West African nations hardest hit by the outbreak.

The worst epidemic of the virus on record has killed more than 8,371 people and infected some 21,171 in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, according to WHO figures released on Monday. More than 3,515 of the dead were from Liberia, it said.

United States aid agency USAID said on Tuesday that new Ebola cases in Liberia have plunged while Sierra Leone, currently the worst-affected country, was beginning to turn the corner in dealing with the virus.

But focus was now Guinea, where the infectious hemorrhagic fever was first detected in March, a USAID official said.

Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Tuesday that he was confident that the outbreak can be brought under control.

(Reporting by James Harding Giayhue; Writing by Bate Felix; Editing by Dominic Evans)


http://news.yahoo.com/liberia-says-limits-ebola-spread-just-two-counties-170455431.html

[Buster's Uncle]

China sending large Ebola relief team to West Africa
Associated Press  18 hours ago



BEIJING (AP) — China is ramping up its assistance in the fight against Ebola by dispatching an additional 232 army medical workers to West Africa, state media reported Tuesday.

The latest contingent to be sent to afflicted nations will depart Tuesday evening, with 154 of them headed to Liberia and 78 to Sierra Leone, according to the China Daily newspaper.

They will join 43 army doctors and 35 specialists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control already working in Sierra Leone, where they have treated 61 patients and trained 1,600 local medical workers.

"Fighting Ebola is not a regional battle, but should be supported globally," the paper quoted deputy director of the National Health and Family Planning Ministry Cui Li as saying.

China, which has not reported any Ebola cases, has already provided $121 million in cash and supplies to the fight against the disease in West Africa.

Chinese medical teams have considerable experience working at home against infectious diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, and avian flu.

The country is also seeking to boost its humanitarian and diplomatic engagement with Africa on a level commensurate with its economic involvement on the continent.

The World Health Association has recorded more than 13,000 cases of Ebola in eight affected countries since the outbreak began, and more than 5,000 deaths.


http://news.yahoo.com/china-sending-large-ebola-relief-team-west-africa-025550284.html

[Buster's Uncle]

After Ebola, WHO blames governments and seeks more clout
Reuters
By Tom Miles  15 hours ago



Healthcare workers prepare to disinfect an ambulance transporting a newly admitted Ebola patient at the entrance to the Save the Children Kerry Town Ebola treatment centre outside Freetown, Sierra Leone, December 22, 2014. REUTERS/Baz Ratner



GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization says governments flouted their obligations during the Ebola crisis and wants more power to tackle health emergencies in future, documents published by the international agency showed on Monday.

The Geneva-based U.N. health organisation has been heavily criticised for its slow response to the Ebola epidemic, which has now killed at least 8,371 people out of more than 21,000 cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

The WHO promised in October to publish a full review of its handling of the outbreak once the epidemic was under control.

But it has not yet done so.

The documents submitted to its 34-nation Executive Board said governments had put International Health Regulations that cover public health risks and disease outbreaks at risk through actions such as closing borders and discriminating against travellers from Ebola-affected countries.

Nor did a "sizable number" of states did not yet have the minimum standards in core areas such as surveillance, preparedness and risk communication, the documents said.

In a second document to its Executive Board, the WHO said it should be restructured and given more power to tackle health emergencies better.

As well as disease outbreaks, crises such as war in Syria, drought in the Horn of Africa and a typhoon in the Philippines had all exposed problems.

"In each case, the response lacked the speed, coordination, clear lines of decision making and dedicated funding needed to optimize implementation, reduce suffering and save lives."

The WHO said it was structured to deal with technical issues and public health recommendations but ill-equipped to jump into action for an emergency, as it is increasingly expected to do.

Its recommendations included expanding its mandate and setting up teams of rapidly deployable experts and systems for managing funds and information.


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-blames-governments-seeks-more-clout-060251442.html

[Buster's Uncle]

British Ebola nurse 'no longer critical': hospital
AFP  January 12, 2015 9:35 AM



Protective clothing and facilities are in place at The Royal Free hospital in north London in preparation for a patient testing positive for the Ebola virus, August 6, 2014 (AFP Photo/Leon Neal)



London (AFP) - A British nurse who contracted Ebola while working as a volunteer in Sierra Leone is "no longer critically ill", the London hospital treating her said Monday.

Pauline Cafferkey is showing signs of improvement but remains in isolation, the Royal Free Hospital in London said in a statement.

Cafferkey was diagnosed in Glasgow on December 29 before being transferred to the Royal Free, which has the only isolation ward for Ebola patients in Britain.

She had contracted the disease while working as a volunteer at a British-built Ebola treatment centre in Sierra Leone.

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has killed nearly 8,300 people with more than 21,000 cases identified since December of last year, according to World Health Organization (WHO) figures.

The vast majority of cases have been in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

A total of 838 healthcare workers are known to have contracted the virus and 495 of them had died as of January 4, the WHO has said.


http://news.yahoo.com/british-ebola-nurse-no-longer-critical-hospital-143556933.html

[Buster's Uncle]

USAID: Eyes on Guinea as Liberia, Sierra Leone improve on Ebola
Reuters  7 hours ago



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The rate of new Ebola cases in Liberia has plunged, Sierra Leone is beginning to turn the corner in dealing with the deadly virus and health officials are now focused on Guinea, a USAID official said on Tuesday.

Guinea is "where we have our eye on at the moment," said Jeremy Konyndyk, director of the USAID office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance. He said the rate of new cases in Liberia have dropped from more than 30 a day to single digits.

Health officials cautioned that there is still a long way to go to eradicate the disease.

(Reporting by Toni Clarke; Editing by Doina Chiacu)


http://news.yahoo.com/usaid-eyes-guinea-liberia-sierra-leone-improve-ebola-141716911.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Massachusetts doctor who beat Ebola heading back to Liberia
Associated Press
By PHILIP MARCELO  January 12, 2015 1:31 PM



WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) — The Massachusetts doctor who beat Ebola plans to return to Liberia, where he contracted the deadly virus, in order to help overworked colleagues in the missionary hospital where he has worked for years.

Dr. Rick Sacra, 52, of Holden, said Monday he won't be working directly with Ebola patients but might be asked to help from time to time, since doctors say he's now immune. He departs Thursday.

"The medical staff is a little bit reduced. They've been working very hard and frankly they need a little bit of a breather," he said at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he is an assistant professor. "I just feel the need to return to hopefully give them a break so they don't burn out."

But Sacra said he has no interest in testing his immunity and promised to follow all the necessary Ebola safety protocols.

He expects to be mostly treating patients with malaria and chronic health issues like high blood pressure and diabetes at ELWA, a hospital in the Liberian capital of Monrovia that is run by Serving In Mission, a North Carolina-based Christian organization.

"I guess I'm less nervous about this trip because the thing that I was afraid of having last time, I've had it, and, thank God, I'm through it," Sacra said.

Sacra contracted Ebola in August while caring for pregnant women not suspected to have Ebola, including delivering babies and performing several cesarean sections. He was treated and released from an Omaha, Nebraska, hospital in September.

Sacra said he's nearly at full strength now, after some "bumps in the road" to recovery that included treatment for vision problems, physical therapy and an upper respiratory tract infection that briefly sent him back to the hospital in October.

"I think of those in Liberia that are having to deal with all these same challenges, with so much less help than I've had," he said.

Sacra returns to a country and a region that appears to be turning a corner in controlling the spread of Ebola, which has claimed over 8,000 lives, mostly in the West African nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, according to the World Health Organization.

During a recent three-week period, the organization reported 70 confirmed new cases of Ebola in Liberia, compared to some 900 in neighboring Sierra Leone and over 300 in Guinea.

Sacra also noted that each country now has enough beds to treat Ebola patients, and that four out of every 10 Ebola patients are now surviving the virus.

Sacra is among at least 10 people — a majority of them health care workers — that have been treated in the U.S. Two of those patients have died.

He is the first U.S. patient to return to West Africa. A British nurse, William Pooley, returned to Sierra Leone in October after being treated in London in September.

Sacra's wife, Debbie, who joined him Monday, said she and the couple's three sons understand and support Sacra's decision to return.

She noted that Liberian doctors and health care workers who have survived the disease are already working in Ebola units and caring for children orphaned by it.

"There is a mindset of paying it forward there," Debbie Sacra said. "I don't really have any worries. I'm just really happy for him and I'm really happy for Liberia. ... I know there are a lot of people looking forward to seeing him."


http://news.yahoo.com/massachusetts-doctor-beat-ebola-heading-back-liberia-140536820.html

[Buster's Uncle]

China quietly toughens travel restrictions on West Africans
Reuters
By Megha Rajagopalan  January 12, 2015 2:40 AM



BEIJING (Reuters) - China has been quietly toughening travel restrictions on students and businessmen travelling from Ebola-hit West Africa even as it increases support to fight the deadly disease on the ground in the region, diplomats say.

Beijing-based ambassadors from Liberia and Sierra Leone, whose countries along with Guinea are the hardest hit by the Ebola outbreak, say some of their nationals are staying away from China due to the new procedures.

No cases of Ebola have so far been reported in China.

"You have many Liberians, Guineans and Sierra Leonians who come frequently to conduct business," Dudley Thomas McKinley, Liberia's ambassador to China, said in an interview. "Of course this has impacted them in a negative way and has slowed it down.

"It has impacted the numbers of people travelling to China from those regions, whether for business or for study," he added, saying he planned to raise the concern with China's Foreign Ministry.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied there was any change in visa policy for West African applicants.

Most West Africans enter China through the southern province of Guangdong, which neighbours Hong Kong. The Guangzhou Daily said 438,000 Africans, mostly traders, passed through the provincial capital from January to October last year.

Victor Bockarie Foh, Sierra Leone's ambassador to China, said he himself faced stepped-up screening when he returned to Beijing after a recent trip to his home country.

"I came back and at the airport I was very rigorously examined," he said, adding he did not fault China for stepping up restrictions on travellers from his country.

"If you fly with a disease like this, it is like flying with a bomb," he said. "They (China) have not closed their doors. They are only being careful."

McKinley said Liberian students, including those on a government scholarships, had difficulties obtaining visas in time to begin the fall semester. Most of their cases were worked out but some had postponed their studies by a term, he said.

The Embassy of Guinea did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

China is not alone in tightening travel restrictions. The United States has toughened health checks for passengers from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Other countries such as Australia have stopped issuing visas altogether for citizens from the impacted countries.

China, Africa's biggest trade partner, promised last year to send over 1,000 personnel to help fight the outbreak that has killed over 8,000 people. Beijing has also contributed over $100 million in aid to the anti-Ebola effort.


http://news.yahoo.com/china-quietly-toughens-travel-restrictions-west-africans-074058133.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Ebola could end in Liberia by June
AFP  3 hours ago



Red cross workers, wearing protective suits, carry the body of a person who died from Ebola, in Monrovia, on January 5, 2015 (AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso)



Miami (AFP) - Liberia, the African nation at the center of world's deadliest Ebola outbreak, could see an end to the epidemic by June if 85 percent of sick people get hospital care, US researchers said Tuesday.

Cases have begun to decline in recent weeks, and schools are set to reopen next month after closing in July as the nation struggled with the fast-moving outbreak of hemorrhagic fever.

If the trend toward better hospitalization and preventive care continues, researchers at the University of Georgia and Pennsylvania State University said the end of the deadly ordeal may be in sight.

The model they described in the journal PLOS Biology includes factors like the location of infection and treatment, the development of hospital capacity and the adoption of safe burial practices.

If an 85 percent hospitalization rate can be maintained, the epidemic should be largely contained by June 2015, said lead author John Drake, an associate professor in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology.

"That's a realistic possibility but not a foregone conclusion," Drake said.



Red cross workers, wearing protective suits, prepare prior to a burial for victims of the Ebola virus, in Monrovia, Liberia, on January 5, 2015 (AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso)


"What's needed is to maintain the current level of vigilance and keep pressing forward as hard as we can."

The model Drake and colleagues devised accounts for variables like how many patients are hospitalized and how many health care workers are infected, rates of transmission from funerals where the corpses of victims are touched and kissed, and the relative effectiveness of Ebola control measures.

They used data from the World Health Organization and the Liberia Ministry of Health for the period from July 4 to September 2, 2014.

During that time, the country added about 300 hospital beds and began to adopt safer burial practices.

The researchers further refined their model in December to account for the addition of more hospital beds.

The exercise showed them that the "response by the Liberian government and international groups had greatly reduced the likelihood of a massive epidemic," the researchers said in a statement.

In Liberia, 3,496 people have died from Ebola in the latest outbreak, the highest death toll of any affected nation.

In all, the WHO says 8,235 people have died and more than 20,000 have been infected with Ebola -- most in the West African nations of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone -- since the outbreak began late in 2013.


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-could-end-liberia-june-191454254.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Most calls to Ebola centre are pranks: S Leone official
AFP  52 minutes ago



Health workers wearing protective equipment attend Ebola patients at Kenama treatment center on November 15, 2014 (AFP Photo/Francisco Leong)



Freetown (AFP) - Eighty percent of people phoning a toll-free Ebola help number are prank callers, the head of the Ebola Call Centre in Sierra Leone Reynold Senessie said Tuesday.

"Such prank calls are affecting the smooth operation of the centre," said Reynold Senessie while briefing Palo Conteh, head of the National Ebola Response Centre (NERC), who paid an unannounced visit to the call centre.

The good news is that "genuine calls are dwindling and response to such calls have been swift," he added.

Conteh warned that the mobile numbers of the prank callers "will be traced and legal action taken against them."

The 117 call centre is the first point of contact for anyone dealing with possible Ebola sufferers or the bodies of those who may have died of the disease which has swept through Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

More than 8,000 people have died in the epidemic.

A senior World Health Organization official said Friday that Sierra Leone now has the means to curb the outbreak.

Eight of the country's 13 districts have reported no new cases for about a week.

The southern district of Pujehun has registered no new cases in six weeks.


http://news.yahoo.com/most-calls-ebola-centre-pranks-leone-official-222222516.html