Ebola News 1/29

[Buster's Uncle]

Weekly Ebola cases below 100, WHO says endgame begins
Reuters
By Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay  36 minutes ago



Health workers push a wheeled stretcher holding a newly admitted Ebola patient, 16-year-old Amadou, in to the Save the Children Kerry town Ebola treatment centre outside Freetown, Sierra Leone, December 22, 2014. REUTERS/Baz Ratner



GENEVA (Reuters) - The number of new confirmed Ebola cases totalled 99 in the week to Jan. 25, the lowest tally since June 2014, the World Health Organization said on Thursday, signalling the tide might have turned against the epidemic.

"The response to the EVD (Ebola virus disease) epidemic has now moved to a second phase, as the focus shifts from slowing transmission to ending the epidemic," the WHO said.

"To achieve this goal as quickly as possible, efforts have moved from rapidly building infrastructure to ensuring that capacity for case finding, case management, safe burials, and community engagement is used as effectively as possible."

The outbreak has killed 8,810 people out of 22,092 known cases, almost all of them in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

Cases and deaths have fallen rapidly in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the past few weeks, with just 20 deaths recorded in Liberia in the 21 days to Jan. 25.

But Guinea reported 30 confirmed cases in the latest week, up from 20 in the previous week. The epidemic is also still spreading geographically there, with a first confirmed case in Guinea's Mali prefecture bordering Senegal, which reopened its border with Guinea on Monday.

A resurgence of the virus in Guinea, where the outbreak began, would threaten President Alpha Conde's goal of eradicating Ebola from the country by early March.

"It is too early to declare a success or a deadline for success," Dr. Peter Salama, global Ebola emergency coordinator for the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), told a news briefing.

"Our work is far from over. During the course of this outbreak, we have repeatedly under-estimated this pathogen. We now have a time-limited window of opportunity to eliminate the virus, by April or May the rains will set in in West Africa, limiting our access and our ability to find cases and trace their contacts," he said.

Some 10,000 children have lost one or both parents to the Ebola virus, while five million children have been deprived of education, Salama said.

"Guinea reopened the schools last week, Liberia will do so next week and Sierra Leone won't be far behind. It is a really important sign of some semblance of a return to normalcy for these societies," he said.

Disease experts say that tracking down everyone who has had close contact with an Ebola patient is crucial to ending the outbreak. But in dozens of remote villages in Guinea, angry residents are blocking access for health workers.

The most intense transmission in Guinea is in Forecariah district, amid reports of "high levels of community resistance to response measures" in the area that is close to the border with western Sierra Leone -- the worst Ebola hotspot.

(Reporting by Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Robin Pomeroy and Crispian Balmer)


http://news.yahoo.com/weekly-ebola-cases-below-100-says-endgame-begins-094904413.html

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Ebola outbreak: Virus mutating, scientists warn
BBC
By Tulip Mazumdar Global health reporter 29 January 2015 Last updated at 00:55 ET

 

Hundreds of blood samples are being analysed to keep track of the virus



Scientists tracking the Ebola outbreak in Guinea say the virus has mutated.

Researchers at the Institut Pasteur in France, which first identified the outbreak last March, are investigating whether it could have become more contagious.

More than 22,000 people have been infected with Ebola and 8,795 have died in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Scientists are starting to analyse hundreds of blood samples from Ebola patients in Guinea.

They are tracking how the virus is changing and trying to establish whether it's able to jump more easily from person to person

"We know the virus is changing quite a lot," said human geneticist Dr Anavaj Sakuntabhai.

"That's important for diagnosing (new cases) and for treatment. We need to know how the virus (is changing) to keep up with our enemy."

It's not unusual for viruses to change over a period time. Ebola is an RNA virus - like HIV and influenza - which have a high rate of mutation. That makes the virus more able to adapt and raises the potential for it to become more contagious.

"We've now seen several cases that don't have any symptoms at all, asymptomatic cases," said Anavaj Sakuntabhai.

"These people may be the people who can spread the virus better, but we still don't know that yet. A virus can change itself to less deadly, but more contagious and that's something we are afraid of."

Latest figures
 
There were fewer than 100 new cases in a week for the first time since June 2014.

In the week to 25 January there were 30 cases in Guinea, four in Liberia and 65 in Sierra Leone.

The World Health Organization says the epidemic has entered a "second phase" with the focus shifting to ending the epidemic.

But Prof Jonathan Ball, a virologist at the University of Nottingham, says it's still unclear whether more people are actually not showing symptoms in this outbreak compared with previous ones.

"We know asymptomatic infections occur… but whether we are seeing more of it in the current outbreak is difficult to ascertain," he said.

"It could simply be a numbers game, that the more infection there is out in the wider population, then obviously the more asymptomatic infections we are going to see."



The current outbreak began in south-eastern Guinea and spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone


Another common concern is that while the virus has more time and more "hosts" to develop in, Ebola could mutate and eventually become airborne.

There is no evidence to suggest that is happening. The virus is still only passed through direct contact with infected people's body fluids.

Infectious disease expert Professor David Heyman said "No blood borne virus, for example HIV or Hepatitis B, has ever shown any indication of becoming airborne. The mutation would need to be major"

Virologist Noel Tordo is in the process of setting up a new from the Institut Pasteur in the Guinea capital Conakry. He said,

"At the moment, not enough has been done in terms of the evolution of the virus both geographically and in the human body, so we have to learn more. But something has shown that there are mutations,"

"For the moment the way of transmission is still the same. You just have to avoid contact (with a sick person)"

"But as a scientist you can't predict it won't change. Maybe it will."

Researchers are using a method called genetic sequencing to track changes in the genetic make-up of the virus. So far they have analysed around 20 blood samples from Guinea. Another 600 samples are being sent to the labs in the coming months.

A previous similar study in Sierra Leone showed the Ebola virus mutated considerably in the first 24 days of the outbreak, according to the World Health Organization.

It said: "This certainly does raise a lot of scientific questions about transmissibility, response to vaccines and drugs, use of convalescent plasma.

"However, many gene mutations may not have any impact on how the virus responds to drugs or behaves in human populations."


'Global problem'
 
The research in Paris will also help give scientists a clearer insight into why some people survive Ebola, and others don't. The survival rate of the current outbreak is around 40%.

It's hoped this will help scientists developing vaccines to protect people against the virus.

Researchers at the Institut Pasteur are currently developing two vaccines which they hope will be in human trials by the end of the year.

One is a modification of the widely used measles vaccine, where people are given a weakened and harmless form of the virus which in turn triggers an immune response. That response fights and defeats the disease if someone comes into contact with it.



The research may explain why some people survive Ebola and others do not


The idea, if it proves successful, would be that the vaccine would protect against both measles and Ebola.

"We've seen now this is a threat that can be quite large and can extend on a global scale," said Professor James Di Santo, and immunologist at the Institut.

"We've learned this virus is not a problem of Africa, it's a problem for everyone."

He added: "This particular outbreak may wane and go away, but we're going to have another infectious outbreak at some point, because the places where the virus hides in nature, for example in small animals, is still a threat for humans in the future.

"The best type of response we can think of… is to have vaccination of global populations."


http://www.bbc.com/news/health-31019097

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WHO says Ebola epidemic on the decline
AFP
By Karim Lebhour  4 hours ago



A health worker checks the body temperature of fans as part of an ebola screening ahead of the 2015 African Cup of Nations group D football match between Cameroon and Ivory Coast in Malabo on January 28, 2015 (AFP Photo/Issouf Sanogo)



Addis Ababa (AFP) - The Ebola epidemic in West Africa appears to be on the decline, with new weekly infections dropping below 100 for the first time in over six months, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

The UN agency said it had now shifted its efforts in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone -- the countries worst-hit by the virus -- from slowing the spread of the virus to ending the epidemic.

UN Ebola coordinator David Nabarro nevertheless cautioned that the epidemic was still not totally contained.

"The number of cases is decreasing week by week and getting to zero in many places... but we still see occasional flare-ups and we still see some surprises with new cases out of our contact lists," Nabarro told AFP.

"That means that the epidemic is not contained yet," he told AFP at the African Union headquarters, as leaders gathered a day ahead of a summit meeting where Ebola is a key issue for discussion.

According to the WHO figures released in Geneva, only 99 new cases were confirmed in the week up to January 25, the first time the figure has dropped below 100 since June 2014.

"The response... has now moved to a second phase, as the focus shifts from slowing transmission to ending the epidemic," the WHO said in a statement.



Medical workers treating their protective gear in an Ebola treatment centre in Monrovia, December 19, 2014 (AFP Photo/Evan Schneider)


"To achieve this goal as quickly as possible, efforts have moved from rapidly building infrastructure to ensuring that capacity for case finding, case management, safe burials, and community engagement is used as effectively as possible."

The worst outbreak of the virus in history has seen nearly 9,000 deaths in a year -- almost all in the Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone -- and sparked a major health scare worldwide.

The three nations have been devastated by the outbreak, which began in December 2013, but all have seen recent signs that the virus is on the wane, with the number of new cases dropping weekly.


- Lessons learnt -

Liberia, once the country worst hit by the outbreak, hopes to have no new cases by the end of next month.

"We must maintain the effort with even greater intensity, the forthcoming rainy season is a concern," Nabarro said.

But he also said there were key lessons from the response to Ebola, and said that a proposal to set up an African equivalent to the United States' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would be a step forward.

"It took us too long to be ready, we need a better response capacity," he said. "The African CDC will allow the AU to be much quicker."

On Friday and Saturday African leaders are set to discuss the economic recovery of countries affected by Ebola, as well as the setting up a "solidarity fund" and planning the CDC centre, which in its initial phase would operate as an "early warning system".

AU Commissioner for Social Affairs Mustapha Sidiki Kaloko, speaking Wednesday, promised it would be operational by mid-2015.

Oxfam has called for a "massive post-Ebola Marshall Plan" for affected west African nations, referring to the United States aid package to rebuild Europe after World War II.

"It's clear that Africa's existing architecture for early disease detection, response and control is wholly inadequate," Oxfam said in a statement on Wednesday.

The World Health Organization admitted earlier this month that the UN agency had been caught napping on Ebola and pledged reforms to avoid similar mistakes in future.


http://news.yahoo.com/un-warns-ebola-epidemic-not-yet-contained-094824678.html

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WHO: Ebola response shifts to ending epidemic
Associated Press
By MARIA CHENG  8 hours ago



In this Friday, Jan. 23, 2015 file photo, an empty area outside a Ebola virus recovery ward, at the Hastings treatment clinic, in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The World Health Organization says officials are now focused on ending the biggest-ever Ebola outbreak rather than just slowing the virus’ spread. In an update published Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015, the U.N. health agency said the three most affected countries _ Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia _ reported fewer than 100 cases in the past week, for the first time since June. Dr. Bruce Aylward, who is leading WHO’s Ebola response, warned that despite the progress made, the virus still isn’t under control. (AP Photo/ Michael Duff, File)
 



LONDON (AP) — Health officials are now focused on ending the biggest-ever Ebola outbreak rather than just slowing the deadly virus' spread, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

The U.N. health agency said the three most affected countries — Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia — have reported fewer than 100 cases in the past week, for the first time since June.

Still, WHO also reported that only 30 percent of new cases in Guinea are known contacts of Ebola patients, meaning officials have no idea how most patients are getting infected. In Liberia, that figure is 50 percent, while no data are available for Sierra Leone. The death rate for hospitalized patients is about 60 percent.

The outbreak is believed to have killed more than 8,000 people since it started in March.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, who is leading WHO's Ebola response, warned that despite the progress made, the virus still isn't under control.

"This is like being in bed with two cobras, and one of them is dead," Aylward said. "You still have an incredibly dangerous situation." He added that Ebola outbreaks often come in waves.

"We cannot say the epidemic is under control," said Jerome Oberreit, secretary general of Doctors Without Borders. At a WHO Ebola meeting on Sunday, Oberreit said there is virtually no sharing of Ebola information about the risks of cases crossing the borders among the three countries in West Africa.

He said surveillance teams lack even basic resources to track down Ebola patients and blamed "international negligence" for the inability to contain the outbreak.

Researchers at the Institut Pasteur in Paris have begun studying whether the virus has undergone any significant mutations since the outbreak began. Viruses like Ebola evolve constantly and it's hard to tell if any genetic changes make a difference to how people get infected or how sick they become.


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-response-shifts-ending-epidemic-102208893.html

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As Ebola 'fear factor' eases, African tourism edges back
Reuters
By Edith Honan  5 hours ago



An orphaned baby elephant walks through mud as tourists take pictures at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Nursery within Nairobi National Park, near Kenya's capital Nairobi April 21, 2013. REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi



NAIROBI (Reuters) - From the jungle-clad slopes of the Great Lakes to the game parks of South Africa, tourism is beginning to recover as the Ebola outbreak in a corner of the continent ebbs and foreigners overcome their fear of the virus.

The epidemic has been confined overwhelmingly to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, where at least 8,700 people have died. But it has resonated all across the continent in the form of cancelled flights, missed meetings and empty hotel rooms, even though Africa's main tourist centres are further from the Ebola zone than Paris.

Inquiries at Safaribookings.com, a marketplace for more than 1,200 safari companies in east and southern Africa, were down 25 percent during the last four months of 2014, but bounced back in January, with a 20 percent rise compared to a year ago.

"It's really increased incredibly over the last three weeks," said Jan Beekwilder, the company's co-owner. "The surplus is really due to the ending of the crisis."

Several individual lodge operators, in despair when Reuters contacted them in October, also said business improved since experts started talking about the beginning of the end of the epidemic.

A scaling back of the wall-to-wall media coverage of the handful of Ebola cases that occurred in Europe and the United States - where most tourists to Africa come from - has helped.

"Things are better," Hotels Association of Tanzania head Lathifa Sykes said, while echoing the frustrations of many Africans who say Westerners often forget that Africa is three times the size of the United States and made up of 54 countries.

Beyond the three countries at the epicentre, Ebola reached only three others, all in West Africa. Eight people died in Nigeria, six in Mali and none in Senegal, where just one case was diagnosed. The outbreak has been declared over in all three.

"The world needs to understand that Africa is not a country. God forbid anything else should happen – Ebola coming back or anything else – but we need to educate our tourists," she said.

In the three worst-hit countries - none of them destinations for all but the hardiest back-packer or bush-whacker - the situation remains bleak, with flight restrictions still in place and foreign firms refusing to let expatriate workers back.

But elsewhere in the immediate neighbourhood, business and leisure travellers are returning, if slowly.

Several managers of beach hotels along Ghana's coast reported a gradual recovery in bookings after a drop of at least 20 percent last year, but they feared it would take time before the stigma caused by the publicity surrounding Ebola disappears.

"The media have terrified people about coming to West Africa and it's been so detrimental," said Wendy Pongo, founder of Big Milly's Backyard, a beach hotel outside the Ghanaian capital Accra famous for its Saturday night reggae.


EBOLA OR GORILLAS?

The concerted international response to the epidemic, now more than 12 months old, has also reassured potential visitors who once worried that the Ebola fight was being left solely to a handful of NGOs and three deeply impoverished governments.

The United States deployed more than 2,000 marines to Liberia from September to help build treatment units, while Britain sent 800 troops to Sierra Leone, a former colony.

After criticism of its ponderous initial response to the outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) also boosted its support of governments and aid agencies, deploying hundreds of officials for 'contact tracing' of possible victims.

"There is comfort in knowing that there are a lot of international hands on the ground and it's not just governments with few resources tackling it themselves," said Dianna Games of the South Africa-Nigeria Chamber of Commerce.

In South Africa, where tourism accounts for nearly 10 percent of GDP, industry officials cited Ebola as one of the reasons for a slightly below-forecast Christmas season but said its potential eradication augured well for 2015.

Elsewhere, hoteliers in remote locations said travellers prepared to deal with discomforts ranging from malaria to political instability were always bound eventually to arrive at a more sober-sided assessment of the risks of Ebola.

"If you look at my bookings diary for November and December, it's just full of crossings out where we've had cancellations," said Aubrey Price, owner of the luxury Ndali Lodge in western Uganda's Ruwenzori Mountains.

"But the cancellations are now drying up and the bookings are coming in so I'm actually pretty optimistic about 2015. It seems people have got used to the threat of Ebola and they just want to come and see gorillas."


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-fear-factor-eases-african-tourism-edges-back-144555341.html

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Suspected Ebola patient admitted to California hospital
Reuters  23 minutes ago



SACRAMENTO, Calif (Reuters) - A patient suspected of being infected with Ebola was admitted on Thursday to the University of California, Davis, Medical Center in Sacramento, the hospital said in a statement.

The statement provided no further immediate information about the patient, except to say that the individual was transferred on Thursday morning from Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento to UC Davis Medical Center with "symptoms consistent with Ebola infection."

It said UC Davis has been designated by the California Department of Public Health as a priority hospital equipped to treat confirmed Ebola patients.

(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Writing and Additional Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Sandra Maler)


http://news.yahoo.com/suspected-ebola-patient-admitted-california-hospital-194609183.html

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Weekly Ebola cases below 100, WHO says endgame begins
Reuters
By Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay  7 hours ago



The World Health Organization's chief on Sunday admitted the UN agency had been caught napping on Ebola, saying it should serve a lesson to avoid similar mistakes in future



GENEVA (Reuters) - The number of new confirmed Ebola cases totaled 99 in the week to Jan. 25, the lowest tally since June 2014, the World Health Organization said on Thursday, signaling the tide might have turned against the epidemic.

"The response to the EVD (Ebola virus disease) epidemic has now moved to a second phase, as the focus shifts from slowing transmission to ending the epidemic," the WHO said.

"To achieve this goal as quickly as possible, efforts have moved from rapidly building infrastructure to ensuring that capacity for case finding, case management, safe burials, and community engagement is used as effectively as possible."

The outbreak has killed 8,810 people out of 22,092 known cases, almost all of them in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

Cases and deaths have fallen rapidly in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the past few weeks, with just 20 deaths recorded in Liberia in the 21 days to Jan. 25.



The World Health Organization (WHO) logo is pictured at the entrance of its headquarters in Geneva, January 25, 2015. REUTERS/Pierre Albouy


But Guinea reported 30 confirmed cases in the latest week, up from 20 in the previous week. The epidemic is also still spreading geographically there, with a first confirmed case in Guinea's Mali prefecture bordering Senegal, which reopened its border with Guinea on Monday.

A resurgence of the virus in Guinea, where the outbreak began, would threaten President Alpha Conde's goal of eradicating Ebola from the country by early March.

"It is too early to declare a success or a deadline for success," Dr. Peter Salama, global Ebola emergency coordinator for the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), told a news briefing.

"Our work is far from over. During the course of this outbreak, we have repeatedly under-estimated this pathogen. We now have a time-limited window of opportunity to eliminate the virus, by April or May the rains will set in in West Africa, limiting our access and our ability to find cases and trace their contacts," he said.

Some 10,000 children have lost one or both parents to the Ebola virus, while five million children have been deprived of education, Salama said.

"Guinea reopened the schools last week, Liberia will do so next week and Sierra Leone won't be far behind. It is a really important sign of some semblance of a return to normalcy for these societies," he said.

Disease experts say that tracking down everyone who has had close contact with an Ebola patient is crucial to ending the outbreak. But in dozens of remote villages in Guinea, angry residents are blocking access for health workers.

The most intense transmission in Guinea is in Forecariah district, amid reports of "high levels of community resistance to response measures" in the area that is close to the border with western Sierra Leone -- the worst Ebola hotspot.

(Reporting by Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Robin Pomeroy and Crispian Balmer)


http://news.yahoo.com/weekly-ebola-cases-below-100-says-endgame-begins-090858117.html

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Ebola May Be Mutating
The Atlantic
By Cari Romm  18 minutes ago






Only a day after the World Health Organization announced that an end was in sight for the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, scientists had less uplifting news: The virus may be mutating.

“The response to the EVD (Ebola virus disease) epidemic has now moved to a second phase, as the focus shifts from slowing transmission to ending the epidemic,” the WHO said in its latest report on the disease yesterday. There were 99 confirmed new cases last week, the lowest number since June.

But researchers at the Institut Pasteur, the French medical-research organization that first identified the outbreak in Guinea last March, said that they’re trying to determine whether the Ebola virus is becoming more contagious.

"We know the virus is changing quite a lot,” Anavaj Sakuntabhai, the head of the Laboratory for Genetics of Human Response to Infection at the Institut Pasteur, told the BBC.  Specifically, he said, there have been a number of asymptomatic cases, meaning that infected people may unknowingly be spreading the disease: “A virus can change itself to less deadly but more contagious, and that's something we are afraid of.”

Sakuntabhai and his colleagues are currently analyzing hundreds of blood samples from Guinean patients to monitor the virus’s evolution. "That's important for diagnosing and for treatment," he said. “We need to know how the virus [is changing] to keep up with our enemy."

"We know the virus is changing quite a lot. It can become less deadly but more contagious, and that's something we're afraid of."

Ebola, like measles, HIV, and influenza, is an RNA virus, meaning it can mutate quickly and often. In August, a paper published in the journal Nature found that the virus had already evolved several times over in the first month of the outbreak in Sierra Leone (five of the paper’s authors died of Ebola before their work was published), though there is still nothing to suggest that the virus has become airborne, a common fear over the course of the epidemic, or that it has evolved out of reach of existing treatments. "The mutations do not seem to be affecting the efficacy of experimental drugs and vaccines," Nature reported of the Sierra Leone paper in August.

According to the most recent numbers from the WHO, the current Ebola outbreak has killed 8,461 people and infected around 22,000, nearly all in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.

Meanwhile, scientists reported the results from the first human trials of an Ebola vaccine, published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, with cautious optimism. “The safety profile is pretty much as we'd hoped and the immune responses are okay, but not great,” Adrian Hill, the lead researcher for the trials, told Reuters, and researchers believe a booster will probably be needed for full protection. Last week, GlaxoSmithKline, the company that developed the vaccine, shipped 9,000 doses to Monrovia, Liberia for a phase III clinical trial. The Institut Pasteur is also working on two vaccines, aiming for human trials by the end of this year.

“The best type of resource we can think of … is to have vaccination of global populations,” James Di Santo, the head of Pasteur’s Innate Immunology Unit, told the BBC. “This particular outbreak may wane and go away, but we're going to have another infectious outbreak at some point, because the places where the virus hides in nature—for example, in small animals—is still a threat for humans in the future.”


http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-may-mutating-205047930--politics.html

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Factbox: How Ebola started and spreads
Reuters  12 minutes ago



(Reuters) - West Africa has grappled with the worst Ebola outbreak on record that has killed at least 8,810 people since March 2014.

The following are some facts about the outbreak:

Ebola had killed 8,810 people out of 22,092 cases as of Jan. 25, 2015, with the vast majority of deaths and cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, according to the United Nations' World Health Organization. The WHO said on Thursday that the focus of the fight against the virus had moved from slowing transmission of the disease to ending the epidemic.

Ebola emerged in a remote forest region of Guinea last March. It has also turned up in Nigeria, Senegal and Mali. Health officials declared Nigeria and Senegal Ebola-free in October. Mali's government declared that country free of the disease on Jan. 18.

There is no vaccine or cure for Ebola, a hemorrhagic fever. In past outbreaks, fatality rates have climbed as high as 90 percent. Ebola causes fever, flu-like pains, bleeding, vomiting and diarrhea.

Pharmaceutical companies are working on experimental Ebola vaccines and antiviral drugs, but a significant number of doses will not be available until at least the first quarter of 2015.

Ebola is not airborne. It is transmitted through blood, vomit, diarrhea and other bodily fluids. Healthcare workers in West Africa have been among the hardest hit by the outbreak.

Ebola symptoms generally appear eight to 10 days after infection, but the incubation period can last from two to 21 days. There is a significant window during which an infected person can escape detection, allowing them to travel. However, they are not considered contagious until they start showing symptoms.

Recovery from Ebola depends on the patient’s immune response. People who recover from Ebola infection develop antibodies that last for at least 10 years.

Ebola patients have been treated in the United States, Spain, Germany, France, Norway, Italy, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The United States, Britain, France, China, Cuba and international organizations are pouring funds, supplies and personnel into the affected parts of West Africa.

Ebola's suspected origin is forest bats. The virus was first identified in 1976 in what is now Democratic Republic of the Congo.

SOURCE: World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(Compiled by Jonathan Oatis; Editing by Toni Reinhold)


http://news.yahoo.com/factbox-ebola-started-spreads-214525292.html

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Suspected Ebola patient admitted to California hospital
Reuters  58 minutes ago



A UC Davis Medical Center official confirms they are treating a patient with a possible Ebola infection at the hospital Thursday morning.



SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - A patient suspected of being infected with Ebola was admitted on Thursday to a special isolation unit of a University of California hospital in Sacramento and was being tested for infection, hospital and public health officials said.

The patient was transferred on Thursday morning to UC Davis Medical Center from Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento, the state capital, with "symptoms consistent with Ebola infection," the medical center said in a statement.

The statement gave no further information about the case.

Sacramento County Public Health Department spokeswoman Laura McCasland was quoted as telling the Sacramento Bee newspaper: "The patient is considered low-risk and more information is being gathered."

Hospital spokeswoman Dorsey Griffith said the patient was being tested but she did not know whether the individual had traveled recently in West Africa, the epicenter of the worst Ebola epidemic on record.



Microscopic view of Ebola virus (EBOV). (Getty Images)


Griffith declined to specify the symptoms exhibited by the person but said they were serious enough "that the patient was admitted as a suspected Ebola patient." The individual was being treated in a special Ebola isolation unit set up at the hospital, she said.

Dr. Gil Chavez, state epidemiologist for the California Department of Public Health, suggested the patient in question may have been in West Africa's Ebola zone.

"Whenever there is a person displaying symptoms that may be Ebola, who has recently traveled to Sierra Leone, Liberia or Guinea, certain precautions are taken, including isolating the patient, ruling out other infectious diseases and testing for Ebola if warranted," he said.

UC Davis Medical Center has been designated by state health officials as a priority hospital equipped to handle confirmed Ebola patients. The medical center remained open and was operating as normal, the hospital said.

At least 10 people are known to have been treated for Ebola in the United States, four of whom were diagnosed with the deadly disease on U.S. soil, during an epidemic that has taken at least 8,800 lives, mostly in the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

Only two people are known to have contracted the virus in the United States - two nurses who treated an Ebola patient from Liberia who became sick while visiting in Dallas. That man, Thomas Duncan, later died.

Dozens of others tested for Ebola in the United States after showing possible signs of the disease or thought to have been exposed to the virus have turned out not to have been infected.

(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Sandra Maler, Peter Cooney and Bill Trott)


http://news.yahoo.com/suspected-ebola-patient-admitted-california-hospital-194609183.html

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Trial finds GSK Ebola shot is safe and provokes immune response
Reuters
By Kate Kelland  20 hours ago



A nurse holds a syringe containing an experimental Ebola virus vaccine during a media visit at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) in Lausanne November 4, 2014. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse



LONDON (Reuters) - First results from a human trial of an Ebola vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline show it is safe and generates an immune response, scientists said on Wednesday, but larger trials are needed to see if it protects and if a booster is needed.

The vaccine is being developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and GSK against the Zaire strain of Ebola -- the one circulating in West Africa -- and the first doses for a larger trial arrived in Liberia last week.

That trial is the first of several mid-stage studies planned for West Africa and aims to test GSK's vaccine and one from Merck and NewLink. Johnson & Johnson and Bavarian Nordic have a vaccine in early-stage clinical tests.

The early-stage Phase I trial of GSK's vaccine was primarily designed to test safety, but Adrian Hill, who led the work at Oxford's Jenner Institute, said it was "encouraging" that the shot also prompted responses from the immune system.

"The safety profile is pretty much as we'd hoped and the immune responses are okay, but not great," he told Reuters.

The data, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, were from 60 healthy volunteers given the vaccine in Britain between Sept. 17 and Nov. 18 last year.

The volunteers got one of three doses - low, medium, or high - and data from 28 days after vaccination showed the shot was safe at these doses, with only mild side effects.

"People typically experienced mild symptoms that lasted for one or maybe two days, such as pain or reddening at the injection site, and occasionally people felt feverish," Hill said.

However, the antibody response was weaker than was found in a trial of the same Ebola vaccine in macaque monkeys, in which the animals were also found to be protected.

Hill said the lower antibody levels, together with a lower response detected in the immune system's T-cells, suggested to him that a booster may well be needed.

Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust charity which helped fund the trial, said it provided "good initial evidence that the GSK vaccine will be safe to use in people".

"However, we still don't know whether it will provide protection against Ebola infection in a real-world situation," he said. "That's why trials in West Africa of this, and the other vaccines in development, must begin as soon possible."


http://news.yahoo.com/trial-finds-gsk-ebola-shot-safe-provokes-immune-065513133--finance.html

[Geo]

The hostel I'm staying in atm has an info sheet on the fridge regarding Ebola. The first hostel I saw one since I arrived in the US. The hostel is HI affiliated, perhaps that's why.