Ebola news 10/18

[Buster's Uncle]

Lab half a world away at center of West Africa Ebola fight
AFP
By Michel Comte  10 hours ago



Safety suits hang in the level four laboratory training facility at the JC Wilt Infectious Diseases Research centre at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba on October 14, 2014



Winnipeg (Canada) (AFP) - A soldier with a fever and a bad cough walked into a Canadian hospital and was swiftly quarantined, while his blood was tested for Ebola at one of the world's few "level four" labs.

Days earlier, he had travelled to Sierra Leone as a member of an aircrew that delivered 128,000 face shields to doctors and nurses fighting an outbreak that has claimed more than 4,000 lives.

His blood sample was sent from the Belleville, Ontario hospital to the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, half a world away from the outbreak in West Africa and one of only 15 laboratories worldwide dealing in deadly pathogens at this level.

The laboratory has been involved in combating Sars, H1N1, West Nile fever and Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and is now at the forefront of the fight against Ebola, corralling and diagnosing suspect cases in Canada, and sending teams of epidemiologists to West Africa to track infections.

It is also here in the windswept Canadian prairies that a potential vaccine, VSV-EBOV, and an experimental treatment for Ebola, ZMapp, were created.

American doctor Kent Brantly and four others who were treated with ZMapp before supplies ran out lived. Two others died.

Clinical trials of VSV-EBOV are now underway on 20 volunteers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the United States, following successful tests in primates.

The results are expected in December.

"If the Canadian vaccine is proven to be safe and deemed effective, it will stop this devastating outbreak," said Health Minister Rona Ambrose.




A lab worker at the JC Wilt Infectious Diseases Research centre at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory, on October 9, 2014 in Winnipeg, Manitoba (AFP Photo/Michel Comte)


- Ebola cure -

ZMapp is a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies engineered by Canadian government researchers in Winnipeg and their peers at the US Medical Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Maryland.

Each team had separately identified Ebola monoclonals that showed promise in animal tests, and to try to optimize the cocktail they tested various combinations.

Two monoclonals from Winnipeg and one from Frederick were eventually chosen to make ZMapp.

At the same time, the Winnipeg team was developing VSV-EBOV.

Ottawa has pledged 800-1,000 doses of the vaccine to the World Health Organization, but they remain in a freezer at the National Microbiology Laboratory as officials hammer out logistics and legal responsibility for emergency use of the experimental drug.

Ebola is transmitted by close contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person. The virus causes fever, vomiting, diarrhea and sometimes fatal bleeding.

Only a handful of the 500 scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory are trained to work in its level four lab, with Ebola and other deadly bugs.



The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada's only level four lab is viewed on October 9, 2014 (AFP Photo/Michel Comte)


They must train at a nearby mock-up: how to put on airtight hazmat suits, going through a series of chemical showers and other decontamination, before being allowed in the actual lab.

It takes 20 minutes to go through the steps to enter or exit the secure lab.

Pressure falls as they move from one room to another, creating an inward air flow to prevent the escape of pathogens.

Once inside, their only contact with the outside world is through a wireless microphone built into their suits.

Here researchers kill the virus, or make it "inactive," explained Darwyn Kobasa, acting chief of special pathogens.

The inactive sample can then be safely moved to a less secure lab for testing.

"We do a lot of diagnostics," said Kobasa. The lab tests hundreds of samples per year for suspected deadly or unknown pathogens.

Most are from people returning to Canada from a "hot zone," he said.


- Tracking outbreaks -

If a pathogen won't come to Winnipeg (couriers have refused to ship anthrax, for example), the Winnipeg researchers will bring a "mobile lab" to it.

The largest such lab on wheels has travelled to a G20 summit in Toronto and the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

A smaller sister unit the size of shipping container and carrying level three and four equipment can be deployed and ready for use within three hours, plus travel time.

The pair also form part of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's bio-terrorism response, testing for anthrax, botulism, plague, Tularemia and other harmful substances.

"Samples can come to us as a powder, or a culture or a liquid. You're only limited by terrorists' imagination," a forensic biologist who asked not to be named told AFP.

Winnipeg teams have also travelled with pop-up labs that fit inside a "hockey bag" to Hong Kong to search for the source of Sars and to Beirut to test for anthrax at an embassy.

Currently, two teams of Winnipeg scientists equipped with pop-up labs are in Sierra Leone tracking the Ebola outbreak, their movements directed from an operations centre at the National Microbiology Laboratory.

Down the hall, meanwhile, tests of the soldier's blood, and 24 other samples, came back negative for Ebola.


http://news.yahoo.com/lab-half-world-away-center-west-africa-ebola-055634402.html

[Buster's Uncle]

U.S. travel ban could sour ties with Ebola-hit nations
Reuters
By David Lewis and Alwyn Scott  15 hours ago



DAKAR/NEW YORK (Reuters) - The first casualty of a possible U.S. ban on travel to and from Ebola-stricken West African nations could be Washington's ties with the region and, to a lesser degree, travel and resources businesses exposed to it.

The White House said on Friday that such a ban advocated by many lawmakers was an option but was not being considered now. Lawmakers and medical experts are debating how much good or harm a ban could do and what was the best way to prevent Ebola's spread at home.

Such a move would make things worse for the nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea battling the outbreak, Liberia’s Information Minister Lewis Brown told Reuters.

"We feel an international travel ban would be absolutely the wrong message to send to the people of West Africa."

In practical terms, cutting off medical professionals and other experts from entering the United States could be "disastrous," Brown said.

It would also be a setback for Washington, which has been at the forefront of international aid efforts sending troops and assistance to help fight the deadly virus that has already killed over 4,500 people.

"Symbolically, isolating the country sends a message to Liberians that they are being abandoned ... A travel ban would also undermine the United States' position as the global leader in the war on Ebola.”

A ban would definitely inflict more economic pain on the three countries than on the United States for which half a billion dollars in trade with the region represents a tiny fraction of its $17 trillion economy.

U.S. businesses most exposed to the Ebola risk, such as airlines, travel agents and importers of West African cocoa and oil, for now are more concerned with a general threat of the virus spreading further than with potential travel restrictions.

There is also little clarity about how such curbs would work in practice and how effective they would be. A group of Republican lawmakers asked President Barack Obama last week for a ban for travelers from the three Ebola-plagued nations, visa restrictions for their citizens and possibly quarantining those who might have been exposed to the virus.

Jamaica, Guyana and several African nations have already imposed travel curbs in the past weeks, but airline experts warn it may prove ineffective given the difficulty in piecing together people's travel history.

U.S. airlines fly to Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal, but they have no direct connections with the three affected countries, so all the traffic from there is coming either through neighboring countries or major gateways such as Paris, Brussels, Casablanca or Madrid.


TRAVEL HISTORY

If, for example, someone flew from Monrovia in Liberia to Brussels and then to New York on separate tickets, customs officials would not necessarily know the person was coming from an Ebola-hit destination.

"A lot of things today are electronic," said Robert Mann, an airline industry consultant. "They're not physical stamps anymore. You can't rely on some of this documentation."

U.S. airlines are already reporting more than a 70 percent year-on-year drop in travel between the United States and the Ebola-affected nations in the past three months, so a ban might not change that much. Business travel might get hit more, though.

Goran Gligorovic, executive vice president of Omega World Travel Inc., which focuses on corporate customers, said potential travel curbs were a greater concern for clients booking trips to Africa that health risks.

"Travel restrictions are never good news for business traveler," he said.

Oil and cocoa importers are preparing for worst-case scenarios, but for now report little impact on their businesses and hope a potential travel ban will not extend to sea shipments. U.S. chocolate manufacturer Hershey said U.S. cocoa stocks would last well into 2015.

Buyers of West African crude that covers over a third of U.S. import demand can expect it to keep flowing even with a ban in place because of the way it reaches its U.S. destination. Instead of disembarking in ports, big oil tankers transfer, or "lighter," their load onto smaller ships offshore, in some cases in international waters.

A wild card in executive's outlooks is psychology.

David Cote, CEO of Honeywell International Inc, a major supplier of aircraft parts, made that point talking to analysts about the possible fallout from the Ebola outbreak.

"In terms of its actual impact on the U.S.... we don't expect much of an impact there. The thing you can't predict is what that fear quotient is going to do."

Only three Ebola cases have been diagnosed in the United States, but those were enough to spur widespread anxiety and calls for travel bans and other radical steps to contain the disease.

And even as there's no evidence that Ebola was affecting travel outside of Africa, shares of U.S. airlines have come under pressure this week, reflecting concerns that just as during the SARS crisis in 2003, worldwide travel industry will suffer.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton and Jason Lange in Washington, Luc Cohen, Edward McAllister and Jessica Ault-Resnick, Jeffrey Dastin in New York and Joe Bavier in Abidjan; Writing by Tomasz Janowski; Editing by Ken Wills)


http://news.yahoo.com/u-travel-ban-could-sour-ties-ebola-hit-010905678--finance.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Brussels Airport to screen baggage from Ebola-infected areas
Reuters
October 17, 2014 11:16 AM



A passenger watches a flight information board showing lots of flights cancelled due to a strike at Zaventem international airport near Brussels January 30, 2012. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir



BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Brussels Airport, a hub for flights coming from Africa, said on Friday it had hired a specialized firm to check baggage coming from Ebola-hit regions, after a union told its members to no longer handle such items.

The company will screen luggage from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia and destroy any it suspects may be contaminated.

Belgium's socialist union on Wednesday had called on its members at Brussels Airport to no longer handle baggage from infected areas.

The airport said in a statement it was "taking such concerns seriously."

European Union health ministers have agreed to try to improve West African nations' screening of departing passengers for Ebola, but disagreed on the need to check travelers arriving in their own countries.

Brussels Airlines, Belgium's largest airline, flies to 19 destinations in Africa including regular flights to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

Belgium's health ministry on Friday appointed a national coordinator for Ebola and said it was considering measures such as checking incoming passengers from infected areas.

"I don't want panic to break out in the country," Health Minister Maggie De Block told a news conference in Brussels.

"Autumn is a time of infections and a runny nose or flu has nothing to do with Ebola," she added.

(Reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)


http://news.yahoo.com/brussels-airport-screen-baggage-ebola-infected-areas-151624668.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Obama Administration Found Nearly 25 Percent Chance of Ebola Spread to USA…BEFORE Obama Said
The Daily Caller  October 16, 2014 2:46 PM






President Obama assured the American public that our country’s Ebola risk was extremely low, even after a federal government-funded study quietly found a nearly 25 percent chance of Ebola reaching the United States in September 2014.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the federal government’s Models of Infectious Disease Agency co-funded a September 2 analysis on the threat of Ebola’s spread to countries including the United States, Israel’s Arutz Sheva reported. The analysis was circulated among federal government officials prior to its September 2 publication date.

The analysis found a nearly 25 percent “probability of Ebola virus disease case importation” to the United States within 3 to 6 weeks.

Nevertheless, President Obama falsely said on September 16 that experts “across our government” agree that America”s Ebola vulnerability was extremely low. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also repeatedly assured the American people that the Ebola risk was low, even after the alarming government study was completed.

“First and foremost, I want the American people to know that our experts, here at the CDC and across our government, agree that the chances of an Ebola outbreak here in the United States are extremely low,” Obama said.

Liberian visitor Thomas Eric Duncan’s arrival in Dallas on September 20 validated the study’s findings with two days to spare.


http://news.yahoo.com/obama-administration-found-nearly-25-percent-chance-ebola-184611722.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Officials fear Ebola's on AIDS path; some disagree
Associated Press
By MIKE STOBBE  7 hours ago



NEW YORK (AP) — Is Ebola the world's worst infectious disease threat since AIDS?

Comparisons between the two deadly diseases surfaced in the last few months as the Ebola outbreak escalated. Both emerged from Africa and erupted into an international health crisis. And both have been a shocking reminder that mankind's battle against infectious diseases can take a sudden, terrible turn for the worse.

In his three decades in public health, the only thing like Ebola has been the AIDS epidemic, said Dr. Tom Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"And we have to work now so this is not the world's next AIDS," he told a meeting of the world's economic leaders in Washington last week.

But Ebola is not expected to ever be in the same league as AIDS in terms of infections and deaths, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

"There is no one that imagines that we're going to see tens of millions of people infected with Ebola," said Fauci, a longtime leader in the fight against AIDS.

This year's Ebola outbreak — the largest ever — has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa. AIDS kills more than a million per year on the continent.

Both diseases are caused by viruses and spread through contact with bodily fluids, not the air, but health experts say the epidemics are more different than they are similar.

Ebola can be more infectious than HIV, according to Dr. Bruce Ribner, a physician involved in the care of four Ebola patients treated so far at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

Indeed, a patient in the throes of Ebola can have 10 billion viral particles in a fifth of a teaspoon of blood — far more than the 50,000 to 100,000 particles seen in an untreated patient with the AIDS virus. Even the skin of an Ebola patient can be crawling with the virus, according to Ribner.

Still, there are reasons to be more optimistic about Ebola than about HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Ebola was actually discovered before HIV. First identified in 1976 and named after a river in Congo, the virus has caused periodic outbreaks in Africa ever since. While a test was made to diagnose it, work on vaccines and treatments has been limited and difficult.

Ebola did not become an international epidemic until this year, when it unexpectedly mushroomed in West Africa. The rapid increase in cases — particularly in Liberia and Sierra Leone — led to the CDC's worst-case-scenario estimate that there could be as many as 1.4 million cases in those two countries alone by January.

But at least scientists had a running start against Ebola.

The beginning of the AIDS epidemic was more challenging. When clusters of cases were first reported in 1981, health officials were facing a mysterious illness with no known cause.

"We didn't know it was a virus. We had no idea what was going on," recalled David Celentano, who was a young AIDS researcher in the 1980s and is now at Johns Hopkins University's school of public health.

Scientists did not isolate HIV until a couple of years later. A test for the virus wasn't available until 1985. There's still no vaccine, but medications have allowed those infected to live longer and healthier lives.

In those first few years, AIDS was generally perceived as occurring mainly in gay men, intravenous drug users and Haitians who had recently entered the United States.

"There was kind of a sense that 'it's only happening in certain places, and it only happens to certain people,'" said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a Columbia University professor who as a young physician treated AIDS patients in New York City.

It wasn't until the mid-1980s when public anxiety and fear about the disease in the U.S. really began to reach the levels seen today with Ebola. In 1985, an Indiana school barred a boy with hemophilia named Ryan White because he was infected through a blood transfusion. Later that year, a national poll showed more than half of Americans favored the quarantining of AIDS patients and 15 percent supported tattooing people who had AIDS.

Beginning in 1987, HIV-positive travelers were banned from entering the country. The rule was changed in January 2010.

Public anxiety about Ebola took flight in the last month with the first case diagnosed in the U.S. in a man who traveled to Dallas from Liberia. In the Dallas area, attendance dropped at schools where children attended who had reportedly been in contact with the man, Thomas Eric Duncan. At the CDC, calls and emails to the federal health agency spiked to more than 800 from a few dozen daily asking questions about the disease.

This past week, screening of travelers from West Africa began at five U.S. airports.

The international response also has been accelerated with Ebola, compared to AIDS. The United Nation's UNAIDS program didn't begin until 1995. Some experts feel real momentum in the international campaign didn't occur until 2000.

The Ebola response also has been faulted as dangerously slow, but it's been much faster than what happened with AIDS. In the last month — about six months after the epidemic in West Africa first began — officials from the United State and other nations have met to ratchet up an international response with money, troops and supplies.

There's one more big difference that ironically makes Ebola more dreadful to many people but possibly easier for health workers to one day beat back, said Dr. James Curran, dean of Emory University's school of public health.

The scariest thing about the Ebola virus is how quickly and dramatically it kills. Initial infection to ghastly death is only a matter of weeks.

That's different from HIV: An HIV-infected person may not have symptoms for years. And a decade may pass before an untreated AIDS victim dies. That means infected people can silently and unknowingly spread the infection for years.

HIV "is insidious," said Curran, who led the CDC's task force on AIDS in the mid-1980s.

Ebola's speed is more terrifying. But it also allows cases to be identified and isolated and contacts to be tracked down and monitored before they can continue to spread the disease.

"It potentially gives us a way to break the back of the epidemic," Curran said.

___

Associated Press video producer Cindy Sharp in Washington contributed to this report.


http://news.yahoo.com/officials-fear-ebolas-aids-path-disagree-071706846.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Panic over Ebola reaches fever-pitch despite calls for calm
AFP
By Marianne Barriaux  23 hours ago



Jeff Hulbert from Annapolis, Maryland, calls for a halt of flights from West Africa, as he protests outside the White House in Washington, DC on October 16, 2014 (AFP Photo/Mladen Antonov)



Paris (AFP) - Airport baggage handlers refusing to unload suitcases, a journalist quarantined by his wife, parents taking kids out of school: hysteria over Ebola has reached fever-pitch the world over despite repeated calls for calm.

The virus has killed nearly 4,500 people, most of them in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, and the disease has reared its ugly head further afield in the United States and Spain, sparking post-apocalyptic fears of mass contagion.

And while tropical disease experts and health authorities have repeatedly stressed that the virus can easily be contained, is not airborne and cannot be transmitted unless an infected person has symptoms, the message does not seem to be getting through.

"There is a gap, a form of distortion, between reality and the fear of being contaminated," said Nicolas Veilleux, a psychologist at Doctors Without Borders (MSF), whose employees are on the frontline of efforts to fight Ebola in west Africa.

"That's also what happened at the beginning of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s," he said, adding that more information about Ebola needed to be given out for general panic to die down.



Passengers make their way from Terminal 4 at the JFK airport, where health screenings have started for travelers arriving from Ebola-hit West African nations, in New York on October 11, 2014 (AFP Photo/Jewel Samad)


- Panic in newsrooms -

Symptoms of Ebola include fever, headache, diarrhoea, vomiting and in some cases bleeding.

The incubation period for the disease -- meaning the time lapse between infection and the onset of symptoms -- is up to 21 days.

And even if a person is infected, only direct contact with their bodily fluids -- mucus, semen, saliva, vomit, stool or blood -- carries any risk of contagion.

These facts have been relayed again and again in the media, but ironically, journalists returning from assignment in west Africa are the first to complain about the stigma they suffer from relatives and colleagues.

Faced with a panicked wife, Johannes Dieterich, the South Africa correspondent for Swiss daily Tages-Anzeiger, said that he slept in the guest room on his return and decided not to touch anyone for three weeks until the incubation period was over.



A journalist holds a Ebola hand book distributed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Manila on October 13, 2014 (AFP Photo/Jay Directo)


Other journalists have also complained about being stigmatised by the very colleagues who should be most informed about the disease.

The BBC's Fiona Bruce, quoted by The Telegraph, said make-up artists were scared of taking care of guests coming from Ebola-hit countries.

"If there are two professions that should spare themselves any fantasies, it's the medical profession first and then journalists who are supposed to translate and transmit information in the most factual way possible," said Loick Berrou, a senior France 24 journalist.

But the fear of a disease that is killing 70 percent of those infected in west Africa, according to the World Health Organization, has well and truly taken hold.

Earlier this month, for instance, two schools in Texas with links to those potentially exposed to an Ebola patient who had travelled from Liberia reported high rates of absenteeism.



An employee of the airport emergency medical service proceeds tests with an electronic thermometer as part of the fight against Ebola virus on October 17, 2014 in Roissy-en-France, suburb of Paris (AFP Photo/Kenzo Tribouillard)


- Congo embassy complains -

African countries that have been completely unscathed by Ebola, meanwhile, are also experiencing discrimination.

Congo-Brazzaville's embassy in Paris issued a statement Thursday complaining that an attempt to meet people from a letting company to rent office space was turned down "due to the Ebola epidemic."

International airports are for obvious reasons also a huge source of concern, despite health measures being set up such as temperature checks.

At Brussels airport on Thursday, baggage handlers refused to unload suitcases coming from Sierra Leone and Guinea until they got more information on Ebola prevention.

In Spain, meanwhile, the infection of a nurse who treated two Ebola patients sparked widespread concern.

An AFP reporter who went to Madrid's Carlos III hospital where the nurse is being treated -- but had gone nowhere near her -- had trouble getting into a taxi in front of the building as the driver feared she may be infected.

And the hospital itself, which Spain has asked to handle Ebola cases, was forced to ask the press not to publish photos of patients at open windows as it had been inundated with calls from people worried the virus could be airborne.

The panic has even spread to the world of sport.

Earlier this month, Spanish club Rayo Vallecano ordered its Guinean international Lass Bangoura to return from African Cup of Nations duty because his teammates were afraid of Ebola.

Veilleux pointed out that there was still more risk in taking one's bike out on the streets of Paris than contracting Ebola.

"There are several thousand cases in Africa, and there has been no case in France so far," he said.


http://news.yahoo.com/panic-over-ebola-reaches-fever-pitch-despite-calls-171836240.html