Ebola news 9/23

[Buster's Uncle]

BBC begins nightly Ebola service in west Africa
AFP
20 hours ago



A woman washes clothes in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on August 13, 2014 (AFP Photo/Carl de Souza)



London (AFP) - BBC World Service radio on Monday began nightly Ebola broadcasts for west Africa, concentrating on efforts to combat the virus across the region.

The nine-minute programme will be broadcast at 1950 GMT on the shortwave frequencies 9915 kHz and 12095 kHz.

The "News About West Africa" broadcasts will include a round-up of developments particularly from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three worst-affected countries.

"Through local stories, correspondents and interviews, the broadcast will include the latest information about local, regional and international effort to contain and combat the disease," the British Broadcasting Corporation said in a statement.

"There is a great deal of new information emerging about how best to respond to Ebola and the programme aims that to share that with an African and global audience."

The World Health Organization updated the epidemic's overall death toll Monday to 2,793, while adding that the outbreak was basically contained in Senegal and Nigeria.

"Lack of knowledge and myths about the disease are killing people as surely as Ebola is," said BBC World Service director Peter Horrocks.

"Quality information from both within and outside the countries affected about how the risks of Ebola can be safely managed will save lives.

"The range of emergency activities on Ebola from the BBC World Service are in the finest traditions of the humanitarian instincts of our broadcasting."


http://news.yahoo.com/bbc-begins-nightly-ebola-west-africa-215114823.html

[Buster's Uncle]

WHO revises up number of health workers killed by Ebola in Sierra Leone
Reuters
4 hours ago



A woman passes a sign posted in an awareness campaign against the spread of Ebola in Freetown, Sierra Leone September 18, 2014 in a handout photo provided by UNICEF. REUTERS/Bindra/UNICEF/handout via Reuters



GENEVA (Reuters) - Thirty more health care workers have died of Ebola in Sierra Leone than previously thought, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday, suggesting the risk to medical staff may have been understated.

A WHO update published on Monday put the number of dead health care workers in Sierra Leone at 61, out of a total of 96 who had fallen ill with the disease.

An update last week said 74 health care workers had caught Ebola in Sierra Leone as of Sept. 14 and 31 had died.

The revised figure means almost six out of 10 health workers who caught the disease in Sierra Leone have died, rather than four out of 10 as previously thought.

WHO epidemiologist Eric Nilles said the additional deaths were found during a "retrospective evaluation" that aimed to improve the overall quality of data published by the WHO.

"WHO continues to improve the characterization of the epidemic in Sierra Leone and as we do so we may see further increases in the proportion of health care workers affected," Nilles said.

The WHO said that as of Sept. 22, a total of 348 health care workers were known to have developed Ebola and 186 of them had died. Half of the cases were in Liberia and 67 in Guinea, which along with Sierra Leone have been worst hit by the outbreak.

In Nigeria, 11 health workers have contracted the disease and five have died. In total, Nigeria has had 8 Ebola deaths and 20 cases.

United Nations and WHO officials have said the high risk for health workers has hampered efforts to find volunteers to go to the epicenter of the outbreak in West Africa.

"We have difficulty in attracting the required numbers of people who are volunteering and feel comfortable to do so," said Antonio Viglilante, head of the U.N. Development Programme in Liberia.

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has killed more than 2,800 people since it began in Guinea earlier this year.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Janet Lawrence)


http://news.yahoo.com/revises-number-health-workers-killed-ebola-sierra-leone-141932087.html

[Buster's Uncle]

US: Ebola cases could hit 1.4 million by mid-Jan.
Associated Press
By MARIA CHENG  3 hours ago



Empty streets are seen during a three-day lockdown to prevent the spread on the Ebola virus, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014. Volunteers going door to door during a three-day lockdown intended to combat Ebola in Sierra Leone say some residents are growing increasingly frustrated and complaining about food shortages.(AP Photo/ Michael Duff)



LONDON (AP) — New estimates by the World Health Organization and the U.S. health agency are warning that the number of Ebola cases could soar dramatically — the U.S. says up to 1.4 million by mid-January in two nations alone — unless efforts to curb the outbreak are significantly ramped up.

Since the first cases were reported six months ago, the tally of cases in West Africa has reached an estimated 5,800 illnesses and over 2,800 deaths. But the U.N. health agency has warned that tallies of recorded cases and deaths are likely to be gross underestimates of the toll that the killer virus is wreaking on West Africa.

The U.N. health agency said Tuesday that the true death toll for Liberia, the hardest-hit nation in the outbreak, may never be known, since many bodies of Ebola victims in a crowded slum in the capital, Monrovia, have simply been thrown into nearby rivers.

In its new analysis, WHO said Ebola cases are rising exponentially and warned the disease could sicken people for years to come without better control measures. The WHO's calculations are based on reported cases only.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, released its own predictions Tuesday for the epidemic's toll, based partly on the assumption that Ebola cases are being underreported. The report says there could be up to 21,000 reported and unreported cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone alone by the end of this month and that cases could balloon to as many as 1.4 million by mid-January.

Experts caution those predictions don't take into account response efforts.

The CDC's numbers seem "somewhat pessimistic" and do not account for infection control efforts already underway, said Dr. Richard Wenzel, a Virginia Commonwealth University scientist who formerly led the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

In recent weeks, health officials worldwide have stepped up efforts to provide aid, but the virus is still spreading. There aren't enough hospital beds, health workers or even soap and water in the hardest-hit West African countries: Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Last week, the U.S. announced it would build more than a dozen medical centers in Liberia and send 3,000 troops to help. Britain and France have also pledged to build treatment centers in Sierra Leone and Guinea and the World Bank and UNICEF have sent more than $1 million worth of supplies to the region.

"We're beginning to see some signs in the response that gives us hope this increase in cases won't happen," said Christopher Dye, WHO's director of strategy and co-author of the study published by the New England Journal of Medicine, who acknowledged the predictions come with a lot of uncertainties.

"This is a bit like weather forecasting. We can do it a few days in advance, but looking a few weeks or months ahead is very difficult."

WHO also calculated the death rate to be about 70 percent among hospitalized patients but noted many Ebola cases were only identified after they died. Dye said there was no proof Ebola was more infectious or deadly than in previous outbreaks.

Outside experts questioned WHO's projections and said Ebola's spread would ultimately be slowed not only by containment measures but by changes in people's behavior.

"It's a big assumption that nothing will change in the current outbreak response," said Dr. Armand Sprecher, an infectious diseases specialist at Doctors Without Borders.

"Ebola outbreaks usually end when people stop touching the sick," he said. "The outbreak is not going to end tomorrow but there are things we can do to reduce the case count."

Local health officials have launched campaigns to educate people about the symptoms of Ebola and not to touch the sick or the dead.

Sprecher was also unconvinced that Ebola could continue causing cases for years. He said diseases that persist for years usually undergo significant changes to become less deadly or transmissible.

Dye and colleagues wrote they expected the numbers of cases and deaths from Ebola to continue rising from hundreds to thousands of cases per week in the coming months — and reach 21,000 by early November. He said it was worrisome that new cases were popping up in areas that hadn't previously reported Ebola, like in parts of Guinea.

Scientists said the response to Ebola in the next few months would be crucial.

"The window for controlling this outbreak is closing," said Adam Kucharski, a research fellow in infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

___

AP Medical Writer Mike Stobbe in New York and Associated Press writer Sarah DiLorenzo in Dakar, Senegal, contributed to this report.

___ Online:

WHO: http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/en/

Journal: www.nejm.org


http://news.yahoo.com/21-000-ebola-cases-november-no-changes-035022634.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Liberia warns Ebola may force region back into conflict
AFP
By Zoom Dosso  7 hours ago



Beds are prepared for patients at the "Island Clinic", a new Ebola treatment centre in Monrovia, on September 21, 2014 (AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso)



Monrovia (AFP) - Liberia has warned it may slip back to civil war along with neighbouring Sierra Leone if the Ebola epidemic ravaging west Africa is allowed to continue to spread.

Information Minister Lewis Brown said the lack of urgency in the international response risked allowing a breakdown of societies in the region, where the outbreak has claimed almost 3,000 lives.

"Hospitals are struggling, but so too are hotels. Businesses are struggling. If this continues the cost of living will go to the roof. You have an agitated population," Information Minister Lewis Brown told AFP late Monday.

"The world cannot wait for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, to slip back into conflict, which could be the result of this slowness in response."

More than 3,000 people have been infected in Liberia and almost 1,600 people have died, with health workers turning away people from treatment units due to chronic shortages of beds and staff.

Sierra Leone, where more than 1,800 have been infected and nearly 600 have died, said Monday it had "an overflow of bodies", after a controversial nationwide lockdown helped uncover more than 200 new cases.



A Liberian Red Cross health worker carries the body of an 18-old-month baby who died from Ebola, on September 12, 2014 in Monrovia (AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso)


The World Health Organization warned on Tuesday that the number of Ebola infections will triple to 20,000 by November, soaring by thousands every week if efforts to stop the outbreak are not stepped up radically.

Liberia has spent a decade recovering from two ruinous back-to-back civil wars which ran from 1989 to 2003, leaving a quarter of a million people dead and the economy in tatters.


- Ebola threatening society -

Sierra Leone, along with Liberia one of the world's poorest countries where half the population lives on less than $1.25 (0.97 euros) a day, is still struggling to recover from its own linked 11-year civil war which ended in 2002.

Guinea, where more than 600 have died, has not suffered civil war but has been plagued by deadly civil unrest in recent years between supporters of President Alpha Conde and the opposition.



The "Island Clinic", a new Ebola treatment centre in Monrovia, pictured on September 22, 2014 (AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso)


"The effect of Ebola is being seen not just as a public health situation but it is also a political situation. Liberia is just ten years out of our conflict," said Brown.

"We are just in the 11th year since we started rebuilding our capacity to live together. This Ebola is threatening that capacity."

Liberia announced on Sunday a four-fold increase in hospital beds to 1,000 for patients in the capital Monrovia by the end of October.

But Brown told AFP the government needed 1,000 beds in ten Ebola treatment units across the country "immediately", and didn't have the cash.

"That is what is lowering public confidence in this fight (and) as a government, we simply cannot afford for our people to have dwindling confidence in our government to respond," he said.

"That is why we are urging the international community to assist us.

"If the population continues to see... that we are beyond our resource capacity to respond the way we would like to respond, it creates a sense of anxiety which can translate into urgency on the part of the population."


http://news.yahoo.com/liberia-warns-ebola-may-force-region-back-conflict-105843472.html

[Buster's Uncle]

U.S. forecasts more than 500,000 Ebola cases in West Africa
Reuters
By Sharon Begley and Tom Miles  22 minutes ago



A woman takes the temperature of a social mobilizer before he handles health supplies in Freetown, Sierra Leone September 19, 2014 in a handout photo provided by UNICEF.REUTERS/Bindra/UNICEF/handout via Reuters



NEW YORK/GENEVA (Reuters) - Global experts issued stark new warnings of the scale of West Africa's Ebola outbreak on Tuesday, with the U.S. government estimating between 550,000 and 1.4 million people might be infected in the region by January.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said its projection was based on data from late August and did not take into account a planned U.S. mission to fight the disease, so the upper end of the forecast was unlikely.

However, it followed research by experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Imperial College, which estimated that 20,000 people risked infection within six weeks -- months earlier than previous forecasts. It warned that the disease might become a permanent feature of life in West Africa.

The worst Ebola outbreak on record has already killed over 2,800 people - more than the combined total of all previous outbreaks. The disease has marched across much of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, killing dozens of health workers and crippling economies recovering from years of conflict.

Outbreaks in Nigeria and Senegal appear for now to have been contained. But nations across the region fear contagion and, against expert advise, have shuttered borders and restricted travel, complicating international efforts to fight the disease.

"I am confident the most dire projections will not come to pass," CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden told reporters.



A woman takes the temperature of a social mobilizer before he handles health supplies in Freetown, Sierra Leone September 19, 2014 in a handout photo provided by UNICEF.REUTERS/Bindra/UNICEF/handout via Reuters


The worst-case scenario assumes that there are 2.5 times the number of recorded cases, currently at 5,864.

"A surge now can break the back of the epidemic," Frieden said. "If you get enough people effectively isolated, the epidemic can be stopped."

Amid complaints from aid workers and regional leaders that the world was doing too little, U.S. President Barack Obama last week announced plans to send 3,000 troops to build 17 treatment centers and train thousands of healthcare workers.

The U.S. move has been welcomed, but it was accompanied by calls for other nations to follow suit, since the disease was still spreading faster than the moves being made to contain it.

Underscoring this gap, a senior U.N. official in Liberia, the worst-hit nation, said on Tuesday that 150 foreign experts were in the country but another 600 to 700 were needed.

Antonio Vigilante, head of the U.N. Development Programme in Liberia, said Liberia now had 350 to 400 beds for Ebola patients, but that fell far short of the 2,000 needed.



A pupil of Olumawu School is guided through the use of hand sanitizers, as school resumes in Abuja September 22, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer


"Even if we are at 2,000 beds two or three weeks from now, the cases we'll have in any single day may be more than that," he said.


HORRENDOUS, SCARY

Much of the international medical assistance has been provided by French medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). However, the group says it is overwhelmed and has called for states to send their medics to the region. The response so far has been muted.

"We have announcements that more will come but very small numbers," Vigilante added. "The American military are bringing in a camp hospital, but it is for 25 beds with medical staff. And so there are still very few."

In a bid to fill the void, Liberia is now planning to train some 40,000 community workers.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf called the CDC predictions "horrendous" and "scary." But now that structures had been put in place, he said, the U.S. effort would help ensure the outbreak would decline as fast as it spread.



A man stands at the gate of an Ebola virus treatment center in Monrovia September 21, 2014. REUTERS//James Giahyue


"I believe that, given another couple of weeks, we shall see that this major effort begins to show results," she said, via Skype to an audience at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Experts from the WHO and Imperial College were less optimistic. In an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, they warned that infections could reach 20,000 by November if strict controls were not put in place.

"With exponential growth, you'll see that the case numbers per week go up, so that by the second of November, over these three countries our best estimate is over 20,000 cases, confirmed and suspected cases," said Dr. Christopher Dye, WHO director of strategy and co-author of the article.

The WHO forecast last month it would take nine months to reach this level of infections. Dye said nearly 10,000 of those would be in Liberia, 5,000 in Sierra Leone and nearly 6,000 in Guinea.


EBOLA PERMANENT

A spokesman for Sierra Leone's army said it had sealed off its borders with Liberia and Guinea, joining similar actions by countries in the region. The move went against a pledge by Africa's leaders at the African Union to lift restrictions.

“Our troops are on the borders to stop the movement, especially of vehicles,” said army spokesman Col. Michael Samura. Witnesses in Kambia, a town bordering Guinea, said dozens of vehicles were turned back on both sides of the frontier.

With the United States taking the lead in Liberia, a nation established by freed American slaves, the British government said on Tuesday it was stepping up its military and humanitarian mission in Sierra Leone, a former colony whose civil war it helped end just over a decade ago.

About 40 military personnel are on the ground helping install a planned 700 new beds, and 164 staff from Britain's National Health Service have volunteered to work in West Africa. They join nations like Cuba, China, Uganda and France who have already promised or sent medics to the region.

Underscoring the economic impact of the crisis, Malaysian palm oil firm Sime Darby has delayed construction of a mill for its Liberia plantation and has frozen talks to expand its planted acreage there because of the outbreak.

Meanwhile, the Wellcome Trust said experimental drugs, including compounds from Mapp Biopharmaceutical, Sarepta and Tekmira , will be tested in affected states for the first time in a bid to fast-track trials.

Dye, the WHO expert, said that if current efforts are fully successful, Ebola will disappear from the human population and return to its animal reservoir, as it has done in other outbreaks in Central Africa where it is relatively common.

But he warned that if control efforts are only partly successful, Ebola viral disease in the human population could become "a permanent feature of life in West Africa".

"Quite honestly if you ask 'can we stamp Ebola out of Liberia?' I'm not sure. In principle we know how to do it, but can we do it on the ground? It remains to be seen."

(Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneval, Kate Kelland in London, David Morgan in Washington, Umaru Fofana in Freetown; Writing by David Lewis; Editing by Daniel Flynn, Larry King)


http://news.yahoo.com/u-forecasts-more-500-000-ebola-cases-west-192032440--finance.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Where Did Ebola Come From?
LiveScience.com
By Rachael Rettner, Senior Writer  6 minutes ago



A microscopic view of the Ebola virus.



In some parts of Africa, myths that Ebola was brought to the regions by health care workers have hurt the ability of workers to respond to the outbreak. But where did Ebola really come from?

The true reservoir for Ebola — that is, where the virus hides when it's not causing outbreaks in people — is not known for sure, but experts say that bats are the likely source of the deadly virus.

"There's a strong circumstantial case, but we haven’t actually got a total smoking gun," said Derek Gatherer, a bioinformatics researcher at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.

The first known human cases of Ebola occurred in 1976 during two simultaneous outbreaks in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which sickened more than 600 people, according to the World Health Organization.

Nearly 20 years later, in 2005, researchers looking for the reservoir of Ebola sampled more than 1,000 small animals in the Central African nations of Gabon and the Republic of the Congo, which have also experienced outbreaks of Ebola. They tested 679 bats, 222 birds and 129 small terrestrial vertebrates.

The only animals found to harbor the Ebola virus were bats, specifically, three species of fruit bat: The hammer-headed bat, Franquet's epauletted fruit bat, and the little collared fruit bat.

At least two of these fruit bat species are also found in Guinea — which is where the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa began — so it's possible that these bats were sources for the outbreak, Gatherer told Live Science.

Researchers in Guinea are now sampling bats in that region to see if any test positive for Ebola, Gatherer said. The current outbreak has sickened more than 5,000 people, and of these, more than 2,600 people have died, according to the World Health Organization.

If bats are the source of the virus, one way people might become infected is by handling bats that are eaten for food, Gatherer said. For example, bat soup is a delicacy in the region.

Officials in Guinea took the step of banning the consumption and sale of bats in March, after the outbreak began, he said.

But it's not necessarily the eating itself that leads to Ebola infection —cooking would likely kill the virus, Gatherer said. Instead, it's the butchering of bats and handling of raw bat meat that's more risky, he said.

Still, it's not known for certain whether bats are the only reservoirs of the virus, or whether it is infections in bats that spilled over to people, Gatherer said.

A stronger case could be made for bats as the source of infection if researchers found the same genetic sequence for Ebola in people and in bats in the region, Gatherer said.

There is some evidence that, rather than being a virus that is always carried by bats, Ebola is actually causing an outbreak in bats — that is, it is being spread among bat populations.

By looking at the virus' genetic material, researchers have found that the same Ebola virus has been carried from bats in Central Africa to bats in West Africa over the past 10 years, Gatherer said.

The virus could have been carried by bats or by people, but if it was carried by people, researchers would have expected to see cases along the way, Gatherer said. "It's probably more likely that there's an epidemic going on in bats, but we can't be absolutely certain," Gatherer said.


http://news.yahoo.com/where-did-ebola-come-202255363.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Ebola Epidemic Could End by January if Efforts Increase
LiveScience.com
By Bahar Gholipour, Staff Writer  8 minutes ago



The Ebola epidemic in West Africa could be brought to an end by late January, but only if efforts to fight the disease's spread continue to scale up, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Every month of delay in increasing efforts to slow the disease's spread — such as sending more beds and medical supplies for patients, as well as training people in the best methods of hygiene and to avoid unsafe burial practices — results in enormous setbacks and a large increase in the death toll, CDC officials said.

The bottom line is "that a surge [in effort] now can break the back of the epidemic," CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden told reporters today (Sept. 23).

However, if the current efforts are not increased at all, a worst-case scenario could unfold, resulting in the number of cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone reaching 1.4 million in just four months (if the estimated unreported cases are accounted for), according to the report released today.

The estimates come from a new tool that models the Ebola epidemic in Liberia and Sierra Leone that researchers created to forecast what might happen in the coming months under different circumstances. The new report did not include Guinea in its projections because the number of cases there has changed in ways that could not be reliably modeled, the researchers said.

The tool was developed by CDC researchers several weeks ago, using the data available then, and does not include the actions taken by the United States and the global community since August.

But a lot has changed since August, Frieden said. The current level of public health response in West Africa and the new data coming from the region suggests that the affected countries will likely avoid the worst-case estimates, Frieden told reporters today.

"I'm confident that the most dire projections are not going to come to pass," Frieden said.

"Part of the point of having a projection of what might happen if we don't take urgent action is to make sure it doesn't happen," he said.

The total number of confirmed Ebola cases in the three most affected countries — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — is currently at 5,800, and 2,800 people have died, according to the World Health Organization.

The new model had some encouraging projections — it showed that if 70 percent of Ebola patients are being treated and are isolated from the community, and that if people follow recommendations to bury those who have died from Ebola safely, the number of new cases would plummet rapidly and the epidemic would stop.

The report found that for every month of delay in increasing the percentage of patients in treatment to 70 percent, there would a tripling in the number of daily cases at the peak of the epidemic.

The cautionary findings of the report emphasize the "enormous cost" of any delay in delivering help, showing that every day counts, Frieden said.


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-epidemic-could-end-january-efforts-increase-202329807.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Ebola Epidemic: The Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios
LiveScience.com
By Bahar Gholipour, Staff Writer  30 minutes ago



The Ebola epidemic in West Africa could be brought to an end by late January, but only if efforts to fight the disease's spread continue to scale up, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Every month of delay in increasing efforts to slow the disease's spread — such as sending more beds and medical supplies for patients, as well as training people in the best methods of hygiene and to avoid unsafe burial practices — results in enormous setbacks and a large increase in the death toll, CDC officials said.

The bottom line is "that a surge [in effort] now can break the back of the epidemic," CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden told reporters today (Sept. 23).

However, if the current efforts are not increased at all, a worst-case scenario could unfold, resulting in the number of cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone reaching 1.4 million in just four months (if the estimated unreported cases are accounted for), according to the report released today.

The estimates come from a new tool that models the Ebola epidemic in Liberia and Sierra Leone that researchers created to forecast what might happen in the coming months under different circumstances. The new report did not include Guinea in its projections because the number of cases there has changed in ways that could not be reliably modeled, the researchers said.

The tool was developed by CDC researchers several weeks ago, using the data available then, and does not include the actions taken by the United States and the global community since August.

But a lot has changed since August, Frieden said. The current level of public health response in West Africa and the new data coming from the region suggests that the affected countries will likely avoid the worst-case estimates, Frieden told reporters today.

"I'm confident that the most dire projections are not going to come to pass," Frieden said.

"Part of the point of having a projection of what might happen if we don't take urgent action is to make sure it doesn't happen," he said.

The total number of confirmed Ebola cases in the three most affected countries — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — is currently at 5,800, and 2,800 people have died, according to the World Health Organization.

The new model had some encouraging projections — it showed that if 70 percent of Ebola patients are being treated and are isolated from the community, and that if people follow recommendations to bury those who have died from Ebola safely, the number of new cases would plummet rapidly and the epidemic would stop.

The report found that for every month of delay in increasing the percentage of patients in treatment to 70 percent, there would a tripling in the number of daily cases at the peak of the epidemic.

The cautionary findings of the report emphasize the "enormous cost" of any delay in delivering help, showing that every day counts, Frieden said.


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-epidemic-best-worst-case-scenarios-202329660.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Ebola drug trials to be fast-tracked in West Africa
Reuters
By Kate Kelland  8 hours ago



A man stands at the gate of an Ebola virus treatment center in Monrovia September 21, 2014. REUTERS/James Giahyue



LONDON (Reuters) - Experimental Ebola drugs including compounds from Mapp Biopharmaceutical, Sarepta and Tekmira will be tested in affected West African states for the first time in a bid to fast-track trials, the Wellcome Trust said on Tuesday.

Announcing a 3.2 million pound ($5.25 million) grant for the work, the global health charity said the money would "enable multiple partners around the world to quickly establish clinical trials at existing Ebola treatment centers".

An Ebola epidemic in West Africa has killed more than 2,800 people since it began in Guinea earlier this year, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has said up to 20,000 people could be affected before it is brought under control.

The outbreak of the virus, one of the most virulent infectious diseases known in humans, has been declared a threat to international peace and security by the UN Security Council and prompted demands for an urgent response.

In August a WHO expert panel unanimously concluded that in such exceptional circumstances it would be ethical to deploy and test unregistered experimental treatments on people with Ebola.

"It is a huge challenge to carry out clinical trials under such difficult conditions, but ultimately this is the only way we will ever find out whether any new Ebola treatments actually work," said Jeremy Farrar, the Wellcome Trust's director.

"What's more, rapid trials, followed by large-scale manufacturing and distribution of any effective treatments, might produce medicines that could be used in this epidemic."

The Wellcome Trust said several potential drugs are under consideration and a group of independent experts appointed by WHO is working to recommend which to prioritize based on factors such as which is likely to work best, their availability, the ability to give them safely, and whether they can be manufactured to a useful scale.

It said various pharma companies including Mapp, Sarepta, and Tekmira were working with the initiative and providing data on efficacy, safety, and production abilities for a number of the experimental treatments.

Mapp Pharmaceutical's experimental drug ZMapp has already been used to treat several Ebola patients who have since recovered, but doctors cannot say for sure whether the drug helped them or whether they would have recovered anyway.

The Ebola virus has killed about 50 percent of those infected in the current epidemic.

The Canadian drugmaker Tekmira said on Monday that U.S. and Canadian regulators had authorized the use of its Ebola treatment in patients who have confirmed or suspected infections.

The Wellcome Trust said that while waiting for the WHO recommendations on which products should be tested in West Africa first, scientists would immediately start working with researchers and doctors in some of the affected countries to assess potentially suitable sites and set up the infrastructure, staffing and systems for the clinical trials, it added.

"In essence we need straightforward clinical trials, as for any drug for any disease, but new ways of working will be needed to provide rapid and reliable answers," said Peter Horby, an associate professor of infectious diseases and global health at Britain's University of Oxford who will help lead the work.

"The Ebola situation in West Africa is an ongoing tragedy of immense proportions and we urgently need to know whether any of these investigational treatments can save lives.".

(1 US dollar = 0.6099 British pound)

(Editing by Dominic Evans)


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-drug-trials-fast-tracked-west-africa-103905637--finance.html