Ebola News 12/26

[Buster's Uncle]

No Christmas for Ebola-ravaged Sierra Leone
By/Debora Patta/CBS News/December 25, 2014, 7:53 PM



LONDON - The Ebola outbreak that originated in West Africa has now grown to more than 19,000 cases and nearly 7,600 deaths worldwide.

In Sierra Leone, the country hit hardest, the government banned holiday celebrations. On the radio, Christmas concerts were replaced by public health announcements.

But even before Sierra Leone took the drastic step of banning all public festivities over Christmas and New Year's, it was going to be a bleak holiday for Ebola orphans. Deprived of one or often both of their parents, they are cared for by survivors of the disease as the infection rate continues to rise in their country.

Sierra Leone has had more than 9,000 cases of Ebola -- more than three times that of Guinea and 1,200 more than Liberia.

American doctor Dan Kelly, an infectious disease expert who just returned from more than a month working in the West African country, says the Christmas ban is sad but necessary.

"I can only imagine how that would impact a country of people who are used to going home to their villages and their families," Kelly said. "I really hope that this is the last Christmas in Sierra Leone that we see the need for a ban."

One reason for the high infection rate is that families have continued to show reluctance in informing health authorities about Ebola cases. For many months Sierra Leoneans have been in denial, and workers at call centers are routinely called liars.

"Most of the people they don't believe in the Ebola stuff," said one worker.

Kelly is convinced infections will continue to flare for at least another six months, but that the roll out of Ebola vaccinations will be crucial in ending this epidemic.

"While we're waiting for vaccines to roll out and become available in West Africa, we need to be providing care," Kelly said. "Unless we do that, so many more people will not just be infected but die."

There is no vaccine currently on the market but scientists are racing to find ways to prevent Ebola. There are encouraging signs: the first-ever human trial of a possible vaccine showed promising results.
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© 2014 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/no-christmas-for-ebola-ravaged-sierra-leone/?ftag=YHF4eb9d17

[Buster's Uncle]

Ebola expert calls for European anti-virus 'corps'
AFP  23 hours ago



Microbiologist Peter Piot of Belgium, who co-discovered the Ebola virus in Zaire in 1976, delivers a speech during a seminar on the virus in Tokyo on October 30, 2014 (AFP Photo/Toshifumi Kitamura)



London (AFP) - Europe will be "vulnerable" if it does not regard viruses as a "national security issue" like the United States, the microbiologist who discovered Ebola said in an interview published Friday.

"It's time the UK and Europe had a well-trained corps of people who are globally experienced and deployable," Peter Piot told the British daily The Independent.

"We don't have that and that makes us vulnerable," said the Belgian scientist, who is director of the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London.

Piot, who recently returned from a visit to treatment centres in Sierra Leone, praised the Centres for Disease Control in the United States as a "formidable force".

"We don't have this 'epidemic intelligence service'. You don't want to depend on information coming from the US... That's a national security issue," he said.

The paper quoted a response from a spokesman for the British health ministry saying: "The outbreak has shown the need to strengthen global response to epidemics and the UK will play its full part."

Piot has been highly critical of the delay in local and international responses to the outbreak in west Africa, but said that now "the effort is paying off".

"There is an opportunity to make sure that this is the last Ebola epidemic where all we have to beat it is quarantine," he said.

Piot co-discovered the virus in 1976 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, naming it after a nearby river.

"I couldn't imagine it would get out of control," he told The Independent.

The World Health Organization said on Monday that more than 7,500 have died from the Ebola virus in the past year -- almost all of them in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-expert-calls-european-anti-virus-corps-001125750.html

[Buster's Uncle]

BioCryst Hits Trifecta For Flu, Ebola, and Hereditary Angioedema
Forbes
David Kroll  12/26/2014 @ 12:05PM



One can’t help but call this week “BioCrystmas.”

Undoubtedly, the most significant development for the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina-based company was Monday’s approval of peramavir (Rapivab) for early-stage influenza infections in adults.

The drug isn’t just the first-ever approval for BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, a major milestone for the 45-employee company founded in 1986. The drug is also home-grown, having been developed in-house at their Birmingham, Alabama, discovery center.

As detailed in a 2000 paper in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Senior Vice President for Drug Discovery, Yarlagadda S. Babu, PhD, and colleagues used structure-guided drug design to create this novel viral neuraminidase inhibitor, then called BCX-1812. The drug selective blocks the enzyme that allows newly-replicated viral particles to be released from infected cells.

The BioCryst inhibitor has a chemical structure that is distinctly different from that of Roche’s oral prodrug, ostelamivir (Tamiflu), originally developed by Gilead, and GSK’s inhaled drug, zanamivir (Relenza), first developed by Australia’s Biota Pharmaceuticals. Although peramivir was originally shown in animal models to have oral activity, it was approved as an intravenous formulation, the first such drug for influenza A and B. It must be given within 48 hours of the development of flu symptoms. Similar to the two previously-approved drugs, peramivir reduces the duration of flu symptoms by about a day.



BioCryst Pharmaceuticals’ Rapivab brand of peramivir injection is approved for uncomplicated influenza in adults with two days of symptom onset. Credit: BioCryst


Unlike osteltamivir, the BioCryst drug is not approved for prevention, but it’s likely to be a follow-on indication. BioCryst received a $234.8 million contract from the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research Development Agency to help develop the drug here in the States after it had been previously approved in Japan and Korea.

Peramivir had been previously approved in Japan and South Korea, where one million patients have already received the drug. It was also available during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic via and FDA emergency use authorization (EUA).


http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2014/12/26/biocryst-trifecta-for-flu-ebola-and-hereditary-angioedema/?partner=yahootix

[Buster's Uncle]

S.Leone nurses strike over Ebola hazard pay amid lockdown
AFP  23 hours ago



A photo taken on November 15, 2014 shows tombstones at a cemetery at the Kenama Ebola treatment center run by the Red Cross in Sierra Leone (AFP Photo/Francisco Leong)



Freetown (AFP) - Nurses at a public hospital in northern Sierra Leone were on strike Thursday to demand hazard pay for treating Ebola patients, as the region was under lockdown in a bid by authorities to combat the killer virus.

Some 30 nurses at the Mabenteh Hospital in the town of Makeni said they had been refusing to work since Wednesday because of "the non payment of risk allowance" by the government for the month of November.

A spokesman for the nurses, Henry Conteh, told public radio: "We are not going to attend to any patients who are already admitted and will not accept any new cases until we are paid."

"The matter is serious and needs to be settled urgently," he said.

There was no immediate information available on how much money the health workers were owed or how many patients had been turned away.

The manager of the Mabenteh Hospital board, Ibrahim Bangura, said he was working "to resolve the issue with the authorities so that patients' lives will not be at risk."

The strike action came as Sierra Leone's northern region marked the second day of a five-day lockdown as part of intensified government efforts to contain the Ebola epidemic, with many public Christmas and New Year celebrations also banned.

Ebola has killed more than 7,500 people over the past year, almost all of them in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone recently overtook Liberia as the country with the highest number of infections, recording 9,004 cases and 2,582 deaths, the World Health Organization said in its most recent update.

Markets and shops were shut in the country's north on Thursday and travel between districts was strictly forbidden save for Ebola health workers and authorised personnel.

Except for Christmas Day mass, no public gatherings were allowed.

The resident minister for the Northern Region, Alie Kamara, told AFP that despite the many restrictions there was "much compliance" with the lockdown.

The Sierra Leonean government already imposed a nationwide shutdown for three days in September in a bid to halt the spread of the disease, when more than 28,000 volunteers went house-to-house to raise awareness about Ebola.

Anti-Ebola teams were out in force again on Thursday, going door-to-door in the west of the country, including in the capital Freetown, for a mass education campaign set to last until December 31.

Sierra's Leone's west "is now experiencing the most intense transmission" of all the affected countries, the WHO said this week.

"We want to hit zero cases soon and although we don't have a fixed date as to when Ebola will end, I think we can say by the first quarter of 2015," said Palo Conteh, head of the government's National Ebola Response Centre.


http://news.yahoo.com/leone-nurses-strike-over-ebola-hazard-pay-amid-002016422.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Ebola death toll rises to 7,693: WHO
AFP  7 hours ago



Medical workers wash their hands in an Ebola treatment centre in Monrovia on December 20, 2014 (AFP Photo/Evan Schneider)



Geneva (AFP) - The death toll from the Ebola outbreak in west Africa has risen to 7,693 out of 19,695 cases recorded, the World Health Organization said Friday.

The previous toll released December 22 stood at 7,518 fatalities out of 19,340 infected in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

Worldwide, the disease has killed at least 7,708, including six in Mali, one in the United States and eight in Nigeria, which was declared Ebola-free in October.

Spain and Senegal, which have both been declared free of Ebola, meanwhile counted one case each, but no deaths.


- Sierra Leone -

Sierra Leone, which has overtaken Liberia as the country with the most infections, counted 9,203 cases and 2,655 deaths on December 24, the WHO said.

Four days earlier the toll stood at 8,939 cases and 2,556 deaths.


- Liberia -

Liberia, long the hardest-hit country, has seen a clear decrease in transmission over the past month.

As of December 20 the country counted 7,862 cases and 3,384 deaths, up from 7,830 cases and 3,376 deaths recorded in the previous update, the WHO said.


- Guinea -

In Guinea, where the outbreak started a year ago, 2,630 Ebola cases and 1,654 deaths were recorded as of December 24.

The previous tally showed the country with 2,571 Ebola cases and 1,586 deaths.


- Healthcare workers -

Ebola, one of the deadliest viruses known to man, is spread only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person showing symptoms such as fever or vomiting.

People caring for the sick or handling the bodies of people infected Ebola are especially exposed.

As of December 21 a total of 666 healthcare workers were known to have contracted the virus, and 366 of them had died, according to WHO.


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-death-toll-rises-7-693-164153569.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Lab mistake may have exposed CDC worker to Ebola virus
The Week
Samantha Rollins  December 25



Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images



A laboratory error at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta may have exposed a lab technician to the deadly Ebola virus, federal officials said Wednesday. The error occurred when the high-security lab accidentally sent the wrong samples, which may have contained the live virus, to another lab that was not equipped to work with them on Monday. The technician will be monitored for symptoms for 21 days, and officials say that since the samples never left the CDC campus, there is no risk to the public.


http://theweek.com/article/index/274180/speedreads-lab-mistake-may-have-exposed-cdc-worker-to-ebola-virus

[Buster's Uncle]

CDC lab worker may have been exposed to Ebola
CBS News/December 24, 2014, 5:37 PM



A mishap at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta may have exposed a lab worker to to the Ebola virus.

The CDC said the incident happened after an Ebola sample researchers were working on in a high-security lab was mistakenly transferred to a lower-security lab on the CDC campus. A technician in the second lab who processed the sample may have been exposed and will be monitored for 21 days for any signs of illness.

The CDC said there was no exposure outside of the lab and no risk to the public. The lab has been decontaminated twice and will remain closed while the incident is investigated.

"I am troubled by this incident in our Ebola research laboratory in Atlanta," CDC director Tom Frieden said in a statement. "We are monitoring the health of one technician who could possibly have been exposed and I have directed that there be a full review of every aspect of the incident and that CDC take all necessary measures."

The CDC said several other people who entered the second lab were "assessed for possible exposure" but are not believed to be at risk and do not require monitoring.

The report follows a series of other serious safety lapses at federal labs earlier this year. In June, as many as 84 workers at a CDC bioterror research lab in Atlanta were potentially exposed to live anthrax after safe transfer protocols were not followed. More than 50 workers took antibiotics as a precaution. No illnesses were reported. The head of the lab later stepped down.

Two other CDC labs were temporarily shuttered in July after officials learned that highly infectious samples of bird flu virus were not handled properly.

And that same month at a National Institutes of Health lab in Bethesda, Maryland, decades-old vials of smallpox were discovered in a storage refrigerator. Investigators later confirmed that the lethal bacteria was, in fact, still live.

At a Congressional hearing on June 16, lawmakers blasted CDC director Frieden over lax safety practices. "Sooner or later that luck will run out and someone will get very sick and die," House Oversight and Investigations subcommittee chair Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., said during opening remarks.

Since then, the CDC says it has been working to improve safety practices, but the latest incident revived concerns about the way federal labs handle some of the most dangerous pathogens known.

"Thousands of laboratory scientists in more than 150 labs throughout CDC have taken extraordinary steps in recent months to improve safety," Frieden said in the press statement Wednesday. "No risk to staff is acceptable, and our efforts to improve lab safety are essential -- the safety of our employees is our highest priority."
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© 2014 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-lab-worker-may-have-been-exposed-to-ebola/?ftag=YHF4eb9d17