Ebola News 1/21

[Buster's Uncle]

U.N. Ebola chief calls for final $1 billion to fight virus
Reuters
By Ben Hirschler  33 minutes ago



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



DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - United Nations agencies need a final $1 billion to fight West Africa's deadly Ebola epidemic as experts move to a new phase involving a massive detective operation to trace remaining cases, the U.N. Ebola chief said on Wednesday.

David Nabarro estimated that an overall total of $4 billion in new money, equivalent to all the aid committed so far, was needed by relief agencies and the worst affected countries themselves to end the epidemic and "help these countries to get back to the economic trajectory they had".

The unprecedented outbreak has so far killed more than 8,400 people, overwhelmingly in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, and the international response has included balance of payments and military support as well as medical help.

So far, U.N. bodies have received around $1 billion, two-thirds of a target set last year. Nabarro, who heads the U.N. response, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the World Food Programme now needed the same amount again.

Although the rate of infection is slowing, experts in Davos said tracking down remaining cases so that the disease cannot flare up again will be a major task.

Jeremy Farrar, director of Britain's Wellcome Trust international medical charity, said the epidemic would have "a long and bumpy tail".

A priority for the next few months will be scaling up efforts to trace all the contacts of infected people. Nabarro said that would require perhaps 1,000 epidemiologists, since there are still around 50 micro-outbreaks in the region:

"I can't say how long it will take, but it is that last part of getting down to zero that might be the most difficult."

Drugmakers and research institutions are meanwhile racing to develop Ebola vaccines, which could yet have a role to play in protecting healthcare workers and other at-risk groups, depending on how much longer the epidemic lingers.

(Editing by Kevin Liffey)


http://news.yahoo.com/u-n-ebola-chief-calls-final-1-billion-151255186.html

[Buster's Uncle]

On Ebola front line, first glimpse of end to epidemic
Reuters
By Emma Farge and Umaru Fofana  1 hour ago



A health worker checks the temperature of a man arriving at Bata Airport, January 14, 2015. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh



FREETOWN (Reuters) - Here at the front line of the Ebola epidemic, the tide seems to be turning against the disease.

A military-style operation to fight the outbreak in Sierra Leone - the worst-affected country - has helped to dramatically reduce new cases, in what health officials say is a major step towards defeating Ebola.

Since it was launched about one month ago, the drive has doubled the number of ambulances for patients in the densely populated west of a country where more than 3,000 people have died.

Police halt vehicles at checkpoints in the tumble-down streets to check temperatures, while posters proclaim in the local Krio language: "Togeda we go stop ebola."

Aid workers also report success in changing behavior in rural areas, notably discouraging people from burial rituals involving direct contact with the dead - a major source of transmission.

As a result, transmission of the hemorrhagic fever has slowed sharply in the West African country, which has recorded more than 10,000 cases since May. There were just 184 new cases in the week to Jan. 11 - the lowest in five months.

More than half of beds in treatment centers across Sierra Leone are now empty - a stark contrast from a peak in November when centers in Freetown overflowed, patients waited days for ambulances and bodies were unburied, or interred secretly in backyards.

This has prompted President Ernest Bai Koroma to say he believes his government - helped by the nearly 800 British soldiers and more than $450 million in foreign aid - can stamp out Sierra Leone's last case by the end of March.

Some health specialists and aid workers are more cautious.

They hope the success in Freetown and its environs is a big step towards beating the epidemic - which has killed more than 8,400 people - now that Liberia and Guinea also appear to have stabilized, but are wary of calling the end of an outbreak that last April seemed to wane in Guinea, only to return ferociously.

"The Sierra Leone problem is turning the corner. I think we'll get close to zero there by March so long as there are no surprises," said Philippe Maughan, senior Ebola operations manager at ECHO, the European Commission's humanitarian aid branch.

"But ... there will be cases popping up here and there over the next six months to a year and we'll need to snuff them out."

United Nations Ebola chief David Nabarro told the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday that U.N. agencies needed a final $1 billion to fight the epidemic in West Africa.


'EBOLA EVANGELIST'

The National Ebola Response Centre (NERC), a new military-style body chaired by Koroma, launched "Operation Western Area Surge" last month in Sierra Leone - a country of six million people where the main industries are fishing and farming but which has huge, largely untapped, mineral reserves.

A jingle is played repeatedly over loud speakers at the command center: "Ebola go, we don't tire!"

Freetown's main Kingtom cemetery has been expanded and highly contagious bodies are buried in deep graves within 24 hours according to strict protocols to prevent transmission.

Burials are important in West African culture, with mourners often touching the corpse in intimate, spiritual farewells to their loved ones. Ebola spreads via contact with bodily fluids of infected people or with corpses of someone killed by it.

The Ebola center has noted pockets of resistance in the capital, which officials attribute to mistrust of authorities due to the weak response before the surge.

In one home in the Devil Hole neighborhood outside Freetown where a nine-year-old boy was taken away by medics, relatives said he caught Ebola from malaria drugs handed out by the government.

"The challenge is this last small group of people who aren't changing their behavior," said Joanna Reid, head of Britain's Department for International Development in Sierra Leone. "That's the last mile."

Aid workers say overcoming misperceptions and changing behavior was critical to breaking transmission chains in rural hotspots like Kailahun, where case counts have fallen to zero. The same must now happen in Freetown, they say.

David Heymann, head of Britain's Chatham House Centre on Global Health Security, said both current success and future progress is largely due to communication.

"They've finally got strong communication ... probably through traditional leaders and others who are helping communities understand how to prevent transmission. From my past experience with outbreaks, when communities learn how to communicate the risks and how to prevent infection, the outbreak stops - it's as simple as that."

Some are taking matters into their own hands, such as Ebola survivor Mohamed Mansaray, 61, who lost six family members to the virus in the fishing village of John Thorpe on the outskirts of Freetown.

"People were attributing the deaths to witchcraft, that's why people died," Mansaray said, sitting on a bench beneath a mango tree. Calling himself an "Ebola Evangelist", he goes from house to house trying to educate locals about the disease.

In a sign of change, John Thorpe residents are starting to hand over the sick to a new center built by charity Oxfam.


CULTURAL VALUES

It has proved harder to change attitudes in Freetown than in rural areas, despite a high case density there of one in around 300 people – a factor that would normally increase awareness.

A November survey showed less than half of respondents in and around Freetown had comprehensive knowledge of Ebola - the nation's lowest level.

"In Freetown, many live roaming lives so the possibility of transmitting correct messages is lower than in rural districts," said British anthropologist Paul Richards, who has 30 years of experience in Sierra Leone.

He said some people resisted because stopping transmission involved attacking key cultural values: "You have to abandon some of the basic features of being a good person - visiting the sick and doing the decent thing for the dead."

In a positive sign, the percentage of corpses picked up by burial teams around Freetown testing positive for Ebola has dropped below 10 percent, from 30 percent before the surge, as families report suspected cases for treatment earlier.

There is still much to be done. There is not yet a central database of Ebola contacts and there are only nine contacts for each Ebola case, versus an average of 10-15 for Liberia.

Even if contacts are established, officials often get lost searching a country with no postcodes and where street numbers are often not sequential.

Speaking from the NERC situation room, a converted court room used to try criminals from the 1991-2002 civil war, its director OB Sisay says a key challenge is deploying resources quickly.

NERC needs approval from partners like the World Bank to allocate budgets - a safeguard against embezzlement.

"Let's say I need food to quarantine a community. It can take two weeks," said Sisay in an interview interrupted every few minutes by demands from medics and local chiefs.

Since Guinea's outbreak began in December 2013, officials have become aware Ebola can rear up from a single imported case, as occurred in Mali in October.

President Koroma now wants to decentralize the Ebola response to handle isolated rural cases. But in a densely-forested country where less than 10 percent of roads are paved, it's hard to get patients in the "wet phase" - vomiting and sometimes bleeding from the eyes and ears - into care.

"We are getting there," said Karline Kleijer, operations manager for Medicins Sans Frontieres in Sierra Leone. "Major steps have been made, but we still have a long way to go."

(Additional reporting by James Harding Giahyue in Liberia, Kate Kelland in London and Ben Hirschler in Davos; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Pravin Char)


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-front-line-first-glimpse-end-epidemic-150942155.html

[Buster's Uncle]

UN says despite progress fight against Ebola is far from won
Associated Press
By EDITH M. LEDERER  17 hours ago



UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Close to 1,000 new cases of Ebola were recorded in the last three weeks despite progress in combatting the deadly disease and "the fight is far from won," the U.N. mission chief in West Africa said Tuesday.

Ismael Ould Cheikh Ahmed told the U.N. General Assembly that "Ebola continues to be a global threat."

But he said "terrifying" and "credible projections" just three months ago that forecast up to 10,000 new cases per week by December never materialized because of the medical, logistical and financial response from countries around the world including almost $2.5 billion in humanitarian aid.

"The epidemic has turned, and we are now beginning to see an overall decline in the number of new cases," said Ahmed, the new head of the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response known as UNMEER.

Liberia has recorded the sharpest decline, from averaging over 300 cases a week in August and September to fewer than 10 cases per week today, he said by videoconference from Sierra Leone.

"With continued efforts and vigilance ... the goal of ending Ebola in Liberia is potentially within reach," Ahmed said.

While the number of reported cases in Guinea declined from 114 in the last week of December to less than 30 in the past week, he said many communities in rural areas are openly hostile and blocking health workers from entering. This means "a significant number of cases may go unreported," he said.

Sierra Leone, and especially its western region, is seeing the most new cases but the numbers are starting to decline from more than 330 in the last week of December to less than 140 in the past week thanks to concerted local, national and international efforts, Ahmed said.

While these figures are encouraging, he said "more than 930 new cases of Ebola and more than 800 deaths were recorded in the last three weeks alone," and much remains to be done to get to zero new cases.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the assembly's 193 member states "to sustain the tremendous momentum we have achieved," including by replenishing his depleted trust fund which spent over $100 million to help fight the disease.

He said the affected countries are starting to prepare "for post-Ebola life" and he has instructed the U.N. system to begin working, in parallel, on restoring essential services and planning for early recovery.

"We are focusing on access to health care for common illnesses, food security, reopening schools and ensuring care for orphaned children," Ban said.

U.N. Ebola chief Dr. David Nabarro said there will be a conference on March 3 in Brussels jointly organized by the U.N. and the European Union to assess the state of the outbreak, the response and recovery.

"We're looking to the end of the outbreak," Nabarro said, "to supporting swift recovery" which also means reviving markets and businesses, and "health systems being built back stronger in the affected countries and beyond."

Nabarro said lessons must be learned from the Ebola epidemic to "understand whether this outbreak could have been responded to quicker with less cost and less suffering."

The World Health Organization's executive board is holding a special session on Jan. 25 "to start looking at how future global health emergencies can be handled with better efficiency and effectiveness," he said.


http://news.yahoo.com/un-says-despite-progress-fight-against-ebola-far-232455314.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Danish PM visits Sierra Leone in solidarity
Associated Press
By CLARENCE ROY MACAULAY  January 20, 2015 11:44 AM



A health care worker, center, takes the temperatures of school children for signs of the Ebola virus inside their classroom, as a child, left, laughs in the city of Conakry, Guinea, Monday, Jan. 19, 2015. Schools shuttered during the height of the Ebola crisis in Guinea began reopening Monday, but many parents were still too afraid to send their children to classes. Employees at the doors of schools in the capital were taking temperatures of everyone who showed up on Monday. (AP Photo/Youssouf Bah)



FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) — Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma applauded the visit of Denmark's prime minister, saying it helps erase stigma and isolation associated with Ebola.

Koroma on Monday greeted Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt on Monday at the official residence, State House, in the capital.

"Sierra Leone should not be isolated and stigmatized because of the Ebola virus disease," he said.

The current Ebola outbreak has claimed over 8,000 lives, mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. It continues to spread in Sierra Leone, with the latest 24-hour update listing 20 new cases in a 24-hour period. Liberia and Guinea have seen new cases drop.

The delegation visited 19 Danish health workers working with the British at an Ebola treatment unit in Northern Port Loko District and saw the Danish ship that brought 105 vehicles to the U.N.'s anti-Ebola campaign, according to Ebun Strasser-King, Sierra Leone's deputy minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation.

The Danish prime minister offered her condolences for the loss of lives in the outbreak. She said she visited to show that Sierra Leone is not alone in this fight.



A health care worker, right, takes the temperatures of school children for signs of the Ebola virus before they enter their school in the city of Conakry, Guinea, Monday, Jan. 19, 2015. Schools shuttered during the height of the Ebola crisis in Guinea began reopening Monday, but many parents were still too afraid to send their children to classes. Employees at the doors of schools in the capital were taking temperatures of everyone who showed up on Monday. (AP Photo/Youssouf Bah)


Koroma lauded the increased international response. He said the government must ensure normal hospital activities are resumed to handle non-Ebola diseases that people also suffer from.

In Liberia, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf sought help for "post-Ebola" building of roads and health infrastructures, in an appeal Monday to the newly accredited Japanese and EU ambassadors.

Liberia has resumed work on the reconstruction of a highway linking the capital with the northeastern part of the country. The $250 million project was halted when Ebola was spreading and should be finished just a couple months behind the December 2015 scheduled completion date, Public Works Minister William Gyude Moore said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Guinea President Alpha Conde will attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to seek investors to help Guinea's economy recover, his press office said. He will call on the international community to maintain maximum mobilization and vigilance until the epidemic is eradicated.

___

AP writer Jonathan Paye-Layleh in Monrovia, Liberia contributed to this report.


http://news.yahoo.com/danish-pm-visits-sierra-leone-solidarity-130141430.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Sierra Leone to reopen schools in March as Ebola infections slow
Reuters  1 hour ago



Health workers escort 9-year-old Maraila, a suspected Ebola victim, to an ambulance in Devil Hole December 17, 2014. REUTERS/Baz Ratner



FREETOWN (Reuters) - Schools in Sierra Leone will reopen in March, the West African nation's government said on Wednesday, eight months after students were sent home and classes shuttered following the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus.

The reopening of schools is another sign the tide may be turning against the outbreak, the worst on record, as infections and the spread of the virus is gradually brought under control.

The outbreak has killed about 8,626 people in the three worst-hit West African nations - Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia - and infected nearly 21,700 people, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.

Sierra Leone's government said in a statement that the decision to reopen schools, one area of life badly hit by the outbreak, was made after a consultative meeting chaired by President Ernest Bai Koroma on Wednesday.

It added that facilities would be provided to ensure that students and teachers were safe.

"We are planning to make sure our schools are safe and disinfected so that we can get back our children to school," said the education minister, Dr Minkailu Bah.

He said teachers would be trained to use thermometers to take the temperatures of pupils and other staff members, and chlorinated water buckets will be made available in all schools.

Ebola is transmitted through bodily fluids, and one of the early symptoms of the disease is a fever.

Bah said that school fees would be subsidised for all pupils in secondary schools to help parents and the ministry would also provide teaching and learning materials.

The head of Britain's Ebola Task Force in Sierra Leone, Donal Brown, called for a proper risk assessment and the state of the disease and conditions on the ground before schools reopen.

Several schools throughout the country are currently being used as Ebola care centres to treat patients.

(Reporting by Umaru Fofana; Writing by Bate Felix; Editing by Hugh Lawson)


http://news.yahoo.com/sierra-leone-reopen-schools-march-ebola-infections-slow-212634650.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Ebola end game in sight as new cases fall sharply in Sierra Leone
Reuters
By Emma Farge and Umaru Fofana  13 hours ago



An ambulance transporting a newly admitted Ebola patient drives to the entrance of the Save the Children Kerry Town Ebola treatment centre outside Freetown, Sierra Leone, December 22, 2014. A healthcare worker has been diagnosed with Ebola a day after flying home to Glasgow from Sierra Leone, the Scottish government said on December 29, 2014. The patient, whom BBC sources described as a female aid worker, will be transferred to a high-level isolation unit in the Royal Free hospital in London. Picture taken December 22, 2014. REUTERS/Baz Ratner (SIERRA LEONE - Tags: HEALTH)



FREETOWN (Reuters) - A military-style operation to fight Ebola in Sierra Leone has helped to dramatically reduce new cases, in what health officials say is a major step towards defeating the deadly disease.

Since it was launched about one month ago, the operation has doubled the number of ambulances for patients in the densely populated west of Sierra Leone, the worst-affected country where more than 3,000 people have died.

Police halt vehicles at checkpoints in the tumble-down streets to check temperatures, while posters proclaim in the local Krio language: "Togeda we go stop ebola."

Aid workers also report success in changing behaviour in rural areas, notably discouraging people from burial rituals involving direct contact with the dead - a major source of transmission.

As a result, transmission of the haemorrhagic fever has slowed sharply in the West African country, which has recorded more than 10,000 cases since May. There were just 184 new cases in the week to Jan. 11 - the lowest in five months.

More than half of beds in treatment centres across Sierra Leone are now empty - a stark contrast from a peak in November when centres in Freetown overflowed, patients waited days for ambulances and bodies were unburied, or interred secretly in backyards.

This has prompted President Ernest Bai Koroma to say he believes his government - helped by the nearly 800 British soldiers and more than $450 million in foreign aid - can stamp out Sierra Leone's last case by the end of March.

Some health specialists and aid workers are more cautious.

They hope the success in Freetown and its environs is a big step towards beating the epidemic - which has killed more than 8,400 people - now that Liberia and Guinea also appear to have stabilised, but are wary of calling the end of an outbreak that last April seemed to wane in Guinea, only to return ferociously.

"The Sierra Leone problem is turning the corner. I think we'll get close to zero there by March so long as there are no surprises," said Philippe Maughan, senior Ebola operations manager at ECHO, the European Commission's humanitarian aid branch.

"But ... there will be cases popping up here and there over the next six months to a year and we'll need to snuff them out."


'EBOLA EVANGELIST'

The National Ebola Response Centre (NERC), a new military-style body chaired by Koroma, launched "Operation Western Area Surge" last month in Sierra Leone - a country of six million people where the main industries are fishing and farming but which has huge, largely untapped, mineral reserves.

A jingle is played repeatedly over loud speakers at the command centre: "Ebola go, we don't tire!"

Freetown's main Kingtom cemetery has been expanded and highly contagious bodies are buried in deep graves within 24 hours according to strict protocols to prevent transmission.

Burials are important in West African culture, with mourners often touching the corpse in intimate, spiritual farewells to their loved ones. Ebola spreads via contact with bodily fluids of infected people or with corpses of someone killed by it.

The Ebola centre has noted pockets of resistance in the capital, which officials attribute to mistrust of authorities due to the weak response before the surge.

In one home in the Devil Hole neighbourhood outside Freetown where a nine-year-old boy was taken away by medics, relatives said he caught Ebola from malaria drugs handed out by the government.

"The challenge is this last small group of people who aren't changing their behaviour," said Joanna Reid, head of Britain's Department for International Development in Sierra Leone. "That's the last mile."

Aid workers say overcoming misperceptions and changing behaviour was critical to breaking transmission chains in rural hotspots like Kailahun, where case counts have fallen to zero. The same must now happen in Freetown, they say.

David Heymann, head of Britain's Chatham House Centre on Global Health Security, said both current success and future progress is largely due to communication.

"They've finally got strong communication ... probably through traditional leaders and others who are helping communities understand how to prevent transmission. From my past experience with outbreaks, when communities learn how to communicate the risks and how to prevent infection, the outbreak stops - it's as simple as that."

Some are taking matters into their own hands, such as Ebola survivor Mohamed Mansaray, 61, who lost six family members to the virus in the fishing village of John Thorpe on the outskirts of Freetown.

"People were attributing the deaths to witchcraft, that's why people died," Mansaray said, sitting on a bench beneath a mango tree. Calling himself an "Ebola Evangelist", he goes from house to house trying to educate locals about the disease.

In a sign of change, John Thorpe residents are starting to hand over the sick to a new centre built by charity Oxfam.


CULTURAL VALUES

It has proved harder to change attitudes in Freetown than in rural areas, despite a high case density there of one in around 300 people – a factor that would normally increase awareness.

A November survey showed less than half of respondents in and around Freetown had comprehensive knowledge of Ebola - the nation's lowest level.

"In Freetown, many live roaming lives so the possibility of transmitting correct messages is lower than in rural districts," said British anthropologist Paul Richards, who has 30 years of experience in Sierra Leone.

He said some people resisted because stopping transmission involved attacking key cultural values: "You have to abandon some of the basic features of being a good person - visiting the sick and doing the decent thing for the dead."

In a positive sign, the percentage of corpses picked up by burial teams around Freetown testing positive for Ebola has dropped below 10 percent, from 30 percent before the surge, as families report suspected cases for treatment earlier.

There is still much to be done. There is not yet a central database of Ebola contacts and there are only nine contacts for each Ebola case, versus an average of 10-15 for Liberia.

Even if contacts are established, officials often get lost searching a country with no postcodes and where street numbers are often not sequential.

Speaking from the NERC situation room, a converted court room used to try criminals from the 1991-2002 civil war, its director OB Sisay says a key challenge is deploying resources quickly.

NERC needs approval from partners like the World Bank to allocate budgets - a safeguard against embezzlement.

"Let's say I need food to quarantine a community. It can take two weeks," said Sisay in an interview interrupted every few minutes by demands from medics and local chiefs.

Since Guinea's outbreak began in December 2013, officials have become aware Ebola can rear up from a single imported case, as occurred in Mali in October.

President Koroma now wants to decentralise the Ebola response to handle isolated rural cases. But in a densely-forested country where less than 10 percent of roads are paved, it's hard to get patients in the "wet phase" - vomiting and sometimes bleeding from the eyes and ears - into care.

"We are getting there," said Karline Kleijer, operations manager for Medicins Sans Frontieres in Sierra Leone. "Major steps have been made, but we still have a long way to go."

(Additional reporting James Harding Giahyue in Liberia and by Kate Kelland in London; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Pravin Char)


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-end-game-sight-cases-fall-sharply-sierra-120706896.html

[Buster's Uncle]

UN reports significant drop in Ebola cases
AFP
By Abhik Chanda  4 hours ago



A football fan holds a sign reading "Stop Ebola in Africa" ahead of a 2015 African Cup of Nations group A football match in Bata, Equatorial Guinea, on January 17, 2015 (AFP Photo/Khaled Desouki)



Geneva (AFP) - The deadly Ebola epidemic is slowing significantly in the three west African countries at its epicentre, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, adding that those countries were now adequately equipped to stem the tide.

The UN health agency said in its latest update that a total of 8,626 people had died as of January 18, almost all of them in west Africa, since the epidemic broke out in December 2013. There were 21,689 confirmed cases.

But decrypting the figures revealed rare good news in the worst ever outbreak of the disease which sparked a health scare the world over.

"Case incidence continues to fall in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone," the WHO said. Liberia, for instance, which had a peak over 300 new cases per week in August and September, only notched up eight last week.

The UN agency also said the three hardest-hit countries which have a creaky health infrastructure and were struggling to deal with the epidemic were now adequately equipped largely thanks to international help.

They now have "sufficient capacity to isolate and treat patients," it said.



Health workers pose at the Ebola Donka treatment centre in Conakry on December 8, 2014 (AFP Photo/Cellou Binani)


The three countries have borne the brunt of the epidemic, representing 99 percent of the total deaths from the haemorrhagic virus.


- 'Sufficient capacity to bury' -

Each country now also had "sufficient capacity to bury all people known to have died from Ebola," the WHO said.

Traditional funeral practices involving close contact with the corpse had dramatically upped the transmission rate in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Moreover the three countries now were able to monitor between 89 and 99 percent of registered contacts on a daily basis, the WHO said, adding that there were 27 laboratories there providing case information services.

Hailing the dramatic fall in the transmission rate, the update said there were only 20 confirmed cases in Guinea last week against 45 the week before.

The figure for Sierra Leone was 117 last week against 184 a week ago, it said, but added that the west of the country remained a problem area with the capital Freetown accounting for 30 of last week's cases.

Mali, which along with Senegal and Nigeria had a minor Ebola scare, was able Monday to declare itself Ebola-free after 42 days without any new cases.

Senegal and Nigeria had previously already done so.

In other good news, the World Bank shaved its estimates of the economic damage of the Ebola epidemic Tuesday, but warned that the three main affected countries would still bear a heavy cost.

After warning last October that the outbreak could wreak $25 billion in economic losses across all of west Africa, the bank said that with Ebola now broadly contained, the total could run to $6.2 billion.

However, the epidemic "will continue to cripple the economies of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone even as transmission rates in the three countries show significant signs of slowing," it said.

Experts reviewed the Ebola crisis on Tuesday at an emergency meeting called by WHO in Geneva. They recommended the continuation of exit screening for people leaving the worst-hit countries but at the same time underscored the need "to avoid unnecessary interference with international travel and trade."


http://news.yahoo.com/un-reports-significant-drop-ebola-cases-000030581.html