Ebola news roundup 8/14

[Buster's Uncle]

Bissau says closes border with Guinea over Ebola fears
Reuters
22 hours ago



A man has his temperature taken using an infrared digital laser thermometer at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja, August 11, 2014. REUTERS/Afolabi Sotunde



BISSAU (Reuters) - Guinea-Bissau has decided to close its frontier with eastern neighbour Guinea in a bid to prevent the entry of the deadly Ebola virus, Prime Minister Domingos Simoes Pereira said.

The disease has killed more than 1,000 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the world's worst outbreak of Ebola, and the World Health Organization has called it an international emergency. Three people have also died in Nigeria.

"Guinea-Bissau has decided to close its border with Guinea-Conakry from Aug. 12 given the threat of the Ebola virus," Pereira told a news conference late on Tuesday.

The order will likely mean the closure of official road border points, but it will be difficult to police the long and porous frontier in rural areas away from formal highways.

Governments have taken a range of measures to prevent the spread of Ebola across international borders.

Ivory Coast on Monday banned air travellers from the three worst-hit countries, while Ghana on Tuesday postponed the start of the academic year for at least two weeks at universities and colleges to allow screening measures to be put in place.


http://news.yahoo.com/guinea-bissau-says-closes-border-guinea-over-ebola-111417379.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Consignment of experimental Ebola drug arrives in Liberia
Reuters
By Clair MacDougall  6 hours ago



MONROVIA (Reuters) - A consignment of experimental Ebola drugs arrived by plane in Liberia on Wednesday to treat two doctors suffering from the virus, which has killed more than 1,000 people across four West African countries.

The drug, ZMapp, arrived in two boxes on a commercial flight from the United States carried by Liberia's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Augustine Ngafuan, and was unloaded at the VIP terminal, a Reuters witness said.

It will be taken to a hospital in the capital and administered to Liberian doctors Zukunis Ireland and Abraham Borbor, who officials said contracted the disease while attending to patients, including a late colleague.

The world's worst outbreak of Ebola has claimed the lives of 1,069 people and there are 1,975 probable and suspected cases, the vast majority in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to new figures from the World Health Organisation.

Three people have died in Nigeria.

The U.N. health agency said only around 10 to 12 doses of the drug have been made and this raises difficult ethical questions about who should get priority access.

The doctors will be the first Africans to receive it, though it has been given to a Spanish priest who later died and two U.S. aid workers who are reported to have shown signs of recovery.

Authorities are also concerned that ZMapp's unproven status could leave them open to the charge that humans are being used as guinea pigs.

"This is not the panacea to the problem. It is at the risk of the patient," Liberia's Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah told journalists at Monrovia's main airport.

Information Minister Lewis Brown told Reuters the drug merely offered a "glimmer of hope" and its use was little more than a gamble.

Even so, the clamour for it is strong given that the contagious haemorrhagic disease is killing more than half of its victims and there is no known cure or vaccine.

"I welcome it. It is very good. Our nurses are dying. If you bring them the medication it will make them stronger to fight Ebola," said stationery seller James Liburd, in Monrovia.


ANOTHER DOCTOR DIES

In evidence of the ethical dilemma, Melvin Korkor, the first Liberian doctor to survive Ebola, said he would not have used ZMapp when he was fighting for his life because U.S. authorities said they were not responsible for any adverse effects.

"Any drug that has not been approved by FDA should not be administered," he told Reuters.

One of the epidemic's most tragic consequences is the toll on health care workers who rushed in as first responders only to become infected themselves due to inadequate protection measures or diagnoses of patients that came too late or were inaccurate.

The World Health Organization said this week that 170 health care workers had been infected and at least 81 had died.

Sierra Leonean doctor Modupeh Cole became the latest medical practitioner to die of Ebola, a health ministry spokesman said on Tuesday.

He contracted the disease after treating a patient who later proved to have the virus and died. The country's leading Ebola doctor, Shek Umar Khan, also died last month.

Eight Chinese health workers are in quarantine in Sierra Leone because they may have contracted Ebola, according to the spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Freetown, Xu Zhou.

The seven doctors and one nurse treated patients at two Chinese-run hospitals in Freetown who later died from Ebola. One of the doctors has emerged from quarantine after a 21-day observation period, Zhou told Reuters.


GUINEA CLOSES BORDER

Despite the stir caused by ZMapp, preventive public health measures will be crucial to containing the outbreak, according to the U.N. health agency.

As a result, West African and other governments, including some which have seen no cases of the virus, have taken measures intended to prevent the spread of the disease.

Guinea-Bissau has decided to close its frontier with eastern neighbour Guinea, Prime Minister Domingos Simoes Pereira told a news conference. Germany on Wednesday urged its nationals to leave Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, though the request did not apply to medical workers or German diplomatic staff, a foreign ministry spokesman said.

The outbreak has brought fresh attention to efforts to find a cure. Scientists in the United States studying Ebola say they have found how it blocks and disables the body's ability to battle infections in a discovery that should help the search for potential cures and vaccines.

The scientists found that Ebola carries a protein called VP24 that interferes with a molecule called interferon, which is vital to the immune response.

"One of the key reasons that Ebola virus is so deadly is because it disrupts the body's immune response to the infection," said Chris Basler of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, who worked on the study.


http://news.yahoo.com/consignment-experimental-ebola-drug-arrives-liberia-070519834.html

[Buster's Uncle]

NewLink says Ebola vaccine trial could start in weeks
Reuters
By Sharon Begley  7 hours ago



A doctor uses a microscope to look at virus samples in a Biosafety Level III laboratory at the National Institute of Health in Lima, August 12, 2014. REUTERS/ Mariana Bazo



(Reuters) - NewLink Genetics Corp, which licensed an Ebola vaccine developed by Canadian government scientists, has enough doses on hand to launch the first human safety trial of an Ebola vaccine this summer, its chief executive said on Wednesday.

The company has also lined up two contract manufacturing companies and possibly a third and will be able to produce tens of thousands of vaccine doses within "the next month or two," Dr Charles Link said in an interview.

The largest Ebola outbreak in history, which has killed more than 1,000 people in West Africa, has lent an unprecedented urgency to efforts to develop vaccines and treatments, which for years had largely languished.

Last week, the Ames, Iowa-based company's wholly owned subsidiary, BioProtection Systems Corp, received $1 million from the United States Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for more pre-clinical toxicology studies, including stepped-up manufacturing, to allow human trials to begin quickly. The vaccine was developed by scientists at the Public Health Agency of Canada.

"DTRA said, 'we want this to move quickly,'" Link said. "Before that, I'd have said it would take eight to 10 months before we could launch human studies, but now it's a matter of weeks."

Only one treatment, made by Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, had even begun human safety trials, while the others had been tested only in non-human primates.

In addition to NewLink, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline is awaiting approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin a human safety trial of an experimental vaccine, possibly as soon as next month.

The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that two experimental Ebola vaccines were set to enter clinical trials in the coming weeks and that there could be enough early-stage data to consider their emergency use late this year.

"There is a way to fast-track clinical trials," WHO Assistant Director-General Marie-Paule Kieny said.

WHO's interest has acted like a starter's pistol in the race to get Ebola drugs or vaccines into the field. On Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote in an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine that "production scale-up" of ZMapp is under way but will take time.

ZMapp is the cocktail of antibodies, produced by Mapp Biopharmaceutical of San Diego, given to two American medical workers who contracted Ebola and were evacuated to Atlanta.

Also on Wednesday, Canada's Tekmira Pharmaceuticals said it was discussing options for its experimental Ebola treatment with governments and other agencies, including the WHO.


DISCUSSIONS WITH GOVERNMENT

NewLink is attempting to fast-track its clinical trials.

Link said the company does not have to wait for manufacturing to ramp up before launching a safety trial of its vaccine: "We reserved plenty of doses" from ongoing studies in lab animals "to do the first human studies."

The company is in discussions with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health and Walter Reed Army Medical Center about where to conduct that trial and how to recruit volunteers. To get robust data, Link said, the vaccine should be given to between 20 and 100 healthy volunteers, all of whom would give informed consent.

Members of the military as well as medical workers on the front lines of the Ebola outbreak are the most likely participants, Link said. Before the trial can go forward, it needs FDA approval, which he expects to come quickly: "I have never seen the FDA so supportive," he said.

FDA spokeswoman Erica Jefferson said she could not confirm that the agency is in discussions with NewLink. "The FDA is generally not allowed to disclose information about any medical product under development," she added.

At least one site for the human safety trial will be in the United States, Link said. But the possibility of conducting a trial in Africa recruiting medical workers has also been raised in frequent conversations between his company and the CDC, WHO and other agencies.

Recruiting volunteers from the U.S. military is also "a distinct possibility," Link said, given the DTRA support and Walter Reed discussions: "From what I'm hearing, I'm not worried about finding volunteers."

The NewLink vaccine uses an attenuated or weakened virus, a pathogen found in livestock called vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). One of the virus's genes is replaced by a gene from the Ebola virus. The Ebola gene makes a harmless protein that sits on the virus's outer coat.

The idea is that after the VSV is injected, the body's immune system will recognize the Ebola protein as foreign and begin making antibodies that destroy Ebola viruses, all of which have the protein.

Link is confident in the vaccine's safety and efficacy, based on results in monkeys. Live, attenuated viruses can cause inflammation and other adverse reactions, but that may be deemed worth the risk given Ebola's high fatality rate.

"We're here to help and do whatever we can" in the disastrous Ebola outbreak, Link said. "My team has been told to get it done tomorrow."


http://news.yahoo.com/newlink-says-ebola-vaccine-trial-could-start-weeks-064849669.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Guinea declares public health emergency over Ebola
Reuters
By Saliou Samb  27 minutes ago



Medical staff working with Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) put on their protective gear before entering an isolation area at the MSF Ebola treatment centre in Kailahun July 20, 2014. REUTERS/Tommy Trencha



CONAKRY (Reuters) - Guinea has declared a public health emergency over an Ebola epidemic that has killed more than 1,000 people in three West African states and is sending health workers to all affected border points, a government official said.

An estimated 377 people have died in Guinea since the world's worst outbreak of Ebola began in March in remote parts of a border region next to Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Guinea says its outbreak is under control with the numbers of new cases falling, but that the new measures are needed to prevent further infection from the other countries at the center of the epidemic.

"Trucks full of health materials and carrying health personnel are going to all the border points with Liberia and Sierra Leone," Aboubacar Sidiki Diakité, president of Guinea's Ebola commission, said late on Wednesday.

As many as 3,000 people are waiting at 17 border points for a green light to enter the country, he said.

"Any who are sick will be immediately isolated. People will be followed up on. We can't take the risk of letting everyone through without checks," he said.



A health worker takes a passenger's temperature with an infrared digital laser thermometer at the Felix Houphouet Boigny international airport in Abidjan August 13, 2014. REUTERS/Luc Gnago


Sierra Leone has declared Ebola a national emergency as has Liberia, which is hoping that two of its doctors diagnosed with Ebola can start treatment on Thursday with some of the limited supply of experimental drug ZMapp.

Canada's Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp is also exploring the possibility of making more of its experimental Ebola treatment, Chief Executive Officer Mark Murray said.

Nigeria, which has also declared a national emergency, on Thursday said it had 11 cases of Ebola after a doctor who treated a Liberian man who brought the disease to Lagos fell ill.

Health experts say the responses of governments to the contagious hemorrhagic disease need to be calibrated to prevent its spread while avoiding measures that could induce panic or damage economies unnecessarily.

The task is made more difficult because the capacity of health services in the three main countries has been stretched to breaking point and mistrust of health workers among some rural communities is high.

In addition, 170 healthcare workers have been infected with Ebola and at least 81 have died among the overall toll of 1,069 people dead, according to the World Health Organization. Three of the dead are in Nigeria.



Workers wearing protective masks sit at the Felix Houphouet Boigny international airport in Abidjan August 12, 2014. REUTERS/Luc Gnago


One of the deadliest diseases known to man, Ebola kills the majority of those infected. Its symptoms include internal and external bleeding, diarrhea and vomiting.


ECONOMIC IMPACT

Ebola also threatens significant economic ramifications for some West African states as disruption to commerce, transport and borders lasts at least another month, said Matt Robinson, a vice president at Moody's ratings agency.

Sierra Leone's economic growth would slow from the 16 percent rate recorded in 2013 if mining sector production is affected, he said, adding a significant increase in expenditure on health in the three main countries is likely.

There is also "an indirect effect arising from an Ebola-induced economic slowdown on government revenue generation in a region where budgets are already hindered by low tax collection," he said.

Among the signs of the regional economic impact, Ivory Coast will not allow any ships from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia to enter its port at Abidjan, according to a port statement.

"Anybody presenting symptoms similar to Ebola on board a ship must be made known to port authorities," it said.

Fewer passengers are arriving at Ivory Coast's main airport from Freetown, Conakry and Monrovia because of the virus leading to a shortfall of about 4,000 passengers a month, Abdoulaye Coulibaly, chairman of Air Cote d'Ivoire, told Reuters.

Ivory Coast and its eastern neighbor Ghana have recorded no cases of Ebola. Ghana's government said it would step up its funding for preventative health and ban the holding of international conferences for three months as a precaution.

Further afield, Korean Air Lines Co Ltd said it will suspend flights to and from Nairobi, Kenya, from Aug. 20 to prevent the spread of the virus.

Malaysian firm Sime Darby said it has relocated expatriate workers at its Liberian oil palm plantation and limited employee movement because of the outbreak.

"The company's routine estate operations are continuing under the supervision of local managers. However, tasks that require technical knowledge of expatriates such as mill construction and planting, have been affected," a spokesman said.

(Additional reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Anuradha Raghu in Kuala Lumpur, Emma Farge in Dakar, Se Young Lee in Seoul, Loucoumane Coulibaly in Abidjan and Clair MacDougall in Monrovia; Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by Janet Lawrence)


http://news.yahoo.com/guinea-declares-public-health-emergency-over-ebola-144329357--finance.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Guinea declares public health emergency over Ebola
Reuters
By Saliou Samb  55 minutes ago



CONAKRY (Reuters) - Guinea has declared a public health emergency over an Ebola epidemic that has killed more than 1,000 people in three West African states and is sending health workers to all affected border points, a government official said.

An estimated 377 people have died in Guinea since the world's worst outbreak of Ebola began in March in remote parts of a border region next to Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Guinea says its outbreak is under control with the numbers of new cases falling, but that the new measures are needed to prevent further infection from the other countries at the center of the epidemic.

"Trucks full of health materials and carrying health personnel are going to all the border points with Liberia and Sierra Leone," Aboubacar Sidiki Diakité, president of Guinea's Ebola commission, said late on Wednesday.

As many as 3,000 people are waiting at 17 border points for a green light to enter the country, he said.

"Any who are sick will be immediately isolated. People will be followed up on. We can't take the risk of letting everyone through without checks," he said.

Sierra Leone has declared Ebola a national emergency as has Liberia, which is hoping that two of its doctors diagnosed with Ebola can start treatment on Thursday with some of the limited supply of experimental drug ZMapp.

Canada's Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp is also exploring the possibility of making more of its experimental Ebola treatment, Chief Executive Officer Mark Murray said.

Nigeria, which has also declared a national emergency, on Thursday said it had 11 cases of Ebola after a doctor who treated a Liberian man who brought the disease to Lagos fell ill.

Health experts say the responses of governments to the contagious hemorrhagic disease need to be calibrated to prevent its spread while avoiding measures that could induce panic or damage economies unnecessarily.

The task is made more difficult because the capacity of health services in the three main countries has been stretched to breaking point and mistrust of health workers among some rural communities is high.

In addition, 170 healthcare workers have been infected with Ebola and at least 81 have died among the overall toll of 1,069 people dead, according to the World Health Organization. Three of the dead are in Nigeria.

One of the deadliest diseases known to man, Ebola kills the majority of those infected. Its symptoms include internal and external bleeding, diarrhea and vomiting.


ECONOMIC IMPACT

Ebola also threatens significant economic ramifications for some West African states as disruption to commerce, transport and borders lasts at least another month, said Matt Robinson, a vice president at Moody's ratings agency.

Sierra Leone's economic growth would slow from the 16 percent rate recorded in 2013 if mining sector production is affected, he said, adding a significant increase in expenditure on health in the three main countries is likely.

There is also "an indirect effect arising from an Ebola-induced economic slowdown on government revenue generation in a region where budgets are already hindered by low tax collection," he said.

Among the signs of the regional economic impact, Ivory Coast will not allow any ships from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia to enter its port at Abidjan, according to a port statement.

"Anybody presenting symptoms similar to Ebola on board a ship must be made known to port authorities," it said.

Fewer passengers are arriving at Ivory Coast's main airport from Freetown, Conakry and Monrovia because of the virus leading to a shortfall of about 4,000 passengers a month, Abdoulaye Coulibaly, chairman of Air Cote d'Ivoire, told Reuters.

Ivory Coast and its eastern neighbor Ghana have recorded no cases of Ebola. Ghana's government said it would step up its funding for preventative health and ban the holding of international conferences for three months as a precaution.

Further afield, Korean Air Lines Co Ltd said it will suspend flights to and from Nairobi, Kenya, from Aug. 20 to prevent the spread of the virus.

Malaysian firm Sime Darby said it has relocated expatriate workers at its Liberian oil palm plantation and limited employee movement because of the outbreak.

"The company's routine estate operations are continuing under the supervision of local managers. However, tasks that require technical knowledge of expatriates such as mill construction and planting, have been affected," a spokesman said.

(Additional reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Anuradha Raghu in Kuala Lumpur, Emma Farge in Dakar, Se Young Lee in Seoul, Loucoumane Coulibaly in Abidjan and Clair MacDougall in Monrovia; Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by Janet Lawrence)


http://news.yahoo.com/guinea-declares-public-health-emergency-over-ebola-143711458--finance.html