Nigeria's Jonathan declares state of emergency over Ebola.....

MMC · Aug 9, 2014

This is not good.....the WHO stated Friday that this an International Heath Emergency. Some think they can contain this....but it may have already broken loose. What say ye?

Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan declared a national state of emergency on Friday over the Ebola outbreak in Africa's most populous country, and approved 1.9 billion naira ($11.7 million) of emergency funds to contain it.

Nigeria has confirmed seven cases of Ebola in its commercial capital Lagos since a man fell sick on arrival from Liberia, two of whom have died. Several dozen people who came into contact with the man are under surveillance.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday that West Africa's Ebola epidemic constituted an international health emergency and the virus, which has killed nearly 1,000 people, could continue spreading for months.....snip~

http://news.yahoo.com/nigerias-jonathan-declares-state-emergency-over-ebola-172550023.html

MMC · Aug 9, 2014

UN: Ebola outbreak a public health emergency.....

The World Health Organization urged nations worldwide to donate money and resources to stop the spread of Ebola as it declared the outbreak in West Africa to be an international public health emergency.

The latest Ebola outbreak is the largest and longest ever recorded for the disease, which has a death rate of about 50 percent and has so far killed at least 961 people, according to the U.N. health agency. It emerged in Guinea in March and has since spread to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria.

"Countries affected to date simply do not have the capacity to manage an outbreak of this size and complexity on their own," WHO chief Dr. Margaret Chan told a news conference Friday in Geneva. "I urge the international community to provide this support on the most urgent basis possible.".....snip~

http://news.yahoo.com/un-ebola-outbreak-public-health-emergency-165938519.html

This is not under control.....of course they can't have everybody panicking either. Travel Bans are and should be up. Doctors are needed there but they best go in covered in airtight suits with their own oxygen. If this doesn't get contained.....this will be a problem.

MMC · Aug 9, 2014

Yeah....I can see how this is no concern. But hey thanks for hitting up the thread.

Hey.....can I get a mod to shut this thread down? Thanks.

waltky · Aug 19, 2014

Civil strife making it harder to fight Liberia's ebola outbreak...

Growing unrest sets back Liberia's Ebola fight
Aug 18,`14: Authorities in Liberia urgently searched on Monday for 17 people who fled an Ebola medical center over the weekend when it was attacked by looters who stole blood-stained sheets and mattresses and took them into an enormous slum.

Health officials were combing Monrovia's West Point area that is home to at least 50,000 people to try to stop the virus from spreading further in a country where more than 400 people already have died. The World Health Organization on Monday urged Liberia and other Ebola-affected countries to screen all passengers leaving international airports, sea ports and major ground crossings. Those with symptoms of the virus also were urged not to travel. Many airlines have halted services to the capitals of Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone.

The weekend chaos in Monrovia highlights the growing unease and panic in Liberia amid the mounting Ebola death toll and illustrates the risks of further instability in this deeply impoverished country where mistrust of the government runs high. In addition, health workers are complaining about a lack of protective gear. Treatment centers are viewed by many as a place where people go just to die. "They are not happy with the way Ebola is being managed and the response that the government is providing," said Koala Oumarou, country director for the aid group Plan Liberia, which is helping the health ministry to raise awareness. "It's where the frustration is coming from."

Liberia's president already has declared a state of emergency, dispatching armed soldiers to enforce quarantines of infected areas. But little was done Saturday to stoop looters from invading the Ebola quarantine center and taking items covered in bodily fluids that now could only further transmit the gruesome virus, witnesses said. Ebola is spread through direct contact with the blood, vomit, feces or sweat or sick people. "This West Point situation really was our greatest setback since we started this fight, and we are working on making sure that we can correct that situation," Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown told The Associated Press. "We have learned a bit of bitter lesson here," he added.

Witnesses say an angry mob attacked the West Point facility, a "holding center" for people who had been exposed to Ebola and were being monitored during an incubation period for signs of the disease. The looters took medical equipment, and mattresses and sheets that had bloodstains, said a senior police official, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists. "All between the houses you could see people fleeing with items looted from the patients," the official said, adding that he now feared "the whole of West Point will be infected."

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Ebola health workers battle death, heat, rumors
Aug 18,`14: Doctors and nurses fighting Ebola in West Africa are working 14-hour days, seven days a week, wearing head-to-toe gear in the heat of muddy clinics. Agonizing death is the norm. The hellish conditions aren't the only problem: Health workers struggle to convince patients they're trying to help them, not hurt them.

Rumors are rife that Western aid workers are importing Ebola, stealing bodies or even deliberately infecting patients. Winning trust is made harder by a full suit of hood, goggles, mask and gown that hides their faces. "You want to say so much ... because they're in so much pain," said nurse Monia Sayah, of Doctors Without Borders. "They suffer so much, but they can only see your eyes." The outbreak has hit three of the world's poorest countries, where health systems there were already woefully understaffed and ill-equipped. In Liberia, there is only one doctor for every 100,000 people, while in Sierra Leone there are two, according to the World Health Organization; there were no statistics available for Guinea. The figure is 245 for the United States.

Emotional distress conspires with exhaustion and dehydration, but doctors say it's hard to stop working. "When the need is so great, you can't justify not being there for a day or going home earlier," said Dr. Robert Fowler, who recently worked in Guinea and Sierra Leone. The critical care doctor at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, Canada - now on sabbatical with the World Health Organization - said that the barrier of the protective suit is big but not insurmountable. "There was a young girl, about 6, who came in late in the illness who was bleeding from her bowels, very dehydrated and delirious," he said. Ebola wiped out her immediate family - so she was all alone. "She was very frightened and very reluctant to engage, and just wanted to push people away," he said. Fowler spent days trying to help her, bringing her things she wanted like Fanta soda. "She eventually developed this sense that this person in the suit who's a bit scary is trying to help me."

One day he brought the girl her favorite dish: cucumbers and lime. "She chowed down," he said - a sign that she was on the mend. Fowler said the girl was close to being discharged by the time he left Guinea. The girl is the exception rather than the rule. Death is the fate of more than half of the West Africans infected in the Ebola outbreak. "With the mortality rate being what it is," Fowler said, "you know every day there will be a couple of patients on your ward who didn't make it through the night." Dr. Kent Brantly - an American who fell sick from Ebola last month treating patients - echoed Fowler in speaking of the moral weight of the struggle. "I held the hands of countless individuals as this terrible disease took their lives away from them," Brantly said in a statement this month. "I witnessed the horror firsthand and I can still remember every face and name."

Brantly is now being treated in an Atlanta hospital. His condition was improving. Sayah, the nurse, said that heat makes it impossible to work continuously for more than an hour. It means tasks have to be completed with near-military precision. Her makeshift Ebola tent hospital in Gueckedou, southern Guinea, was converted from an earlier clinic set up by Doctors Without Borders to handle cholera epidemics. "If you have to do patients' blood work and IVs, you focus only on this, and you know your other team members will get the patients food and drink," she said. The tough odds don't make it easier to see a patient die.

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waltky · Aug 26, 2014

Ebola doctor dies after given experimental drug...

Liberia: Doctor given experimental Ebola drug dies
Aug 25,`14 -- A Liberian doctor who received one of the last known doses of an experimental Ebola drug has died, officials said Monday. Separately, Canada said it has yet to send out an untested vaccine that the government is donating.

Ebola has left more than 1,400 people dead across West Africa, underscoring the urgency for developing potential ways to stop and treat the disease. However, health experts warn these drugs and vaccines have not undergone the rigorous testing that usually takes place before they are used. The experimental vaccines are at still at a Canadian laboratory, said Patrick Gaebel, spokesman for the Public Health Agency of Canada, who declined to speculate how many weeks it could be before those are given to volunteers. "We are now working with the (World Health Organization) to address complex regulatory, logistical and ethical issues so that the vaccine can be safely and ethically deployed as rapidly as possible," Gaebel said.

Earlier this month, Canada said it would donate 800 to 1,000 doses of an Ebola vaccine that it developed. Likely candidates include health care workers treating Ebola patients. The experimental drug known as ZMapp has been tried in only six people. Health experts caution that since ZMapp was never tested in humans, it is unclear whether it works. The small supply is now said to be exhausted and it is expected to be months before more can be produced. Dr. Abraham Borbor, the deputy chief medical doctor at Liberia's largest hospital, had received ZMapp, along with two other Liberians. He "was showing signs of improvement but yesterday he took a turn for the worse," and died Sunday, Information Minister Lewis Brown told The Associated Press.

Liberian security forces with riot gear stop people from leaving the West Point area, that has been hardest hit by the Ebola virus spreading in Monrovia, Liberia, Monday, Aug. 25, 2014. A Liberian doctor who was among three Africans to receive an experimental Ebola drug has died, the country's information minister said Monday.

There was no update provided Monday on the other two Liberians who received the drug. Earlier, it had been given to two Americans aid workers and a Spanish missionary priest, who died after he left Liberia. After receiving rigorous medical care in the U.S., the Americans survived the virus that has killed about half of its victims. Ebola can cause a grisly death with bleeding from the eyes, mouth and ears. The virus can only be transmitted through direct contact with the bodily fluids of the sick or from touching victims' bodies, leaving doctors and other health care workers most vulnerable to contracting it.

International relief efforts have included shipments of gloves, gowns, face masks and other protective equipment, although it's not clear how many have reached health workers struggling to contain the epidemic in West Africa, where even such basics as sterile fluids can be in short supply. But just getting enough gear isn't the whole story: Health workers can infect themselves while taking off contaminated equipment if they don't do it properly, a trio of infectious disease experts wrote Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine.

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waltky · Aug 28, 2014

Granny says, "It's the end times - we all gonna die...

US official warns Ebola outbreak will get worse
Aug 27,`14 -- A third top doctor has died from Ebola in Sierra Leone, a government official said Wednesday, as a leading American health official warned that the outbreak sweeping West Africa would get worse.

The disease has already killed more than 1,400 people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, and Doctors Without Borders warned that the tremendous influx of patients in Liberia, in particular, is overwhelming their treatment centers there. "I wish I didn't have to say this, but it is going get worse before it gets better," Dr. Tom Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said of the outbreak at the end of a visit to Liberia, where he described the situation as dire. Liberia has recorded the highest number of cases and deaths of any of the four countries. Doctors Without Borders said in a statement that a new treatment center recently opened in the country's capital with 120 beds filled up almost immediately.

The tremendous number of patients means that the medical charity is not able to provide those patients with intravenous treatments, a primary way doctors keep people who are losing a tremendous amount of fluid alive. The group did not mention Frieden's visit or recent U.N. ones, but it said discussions happening now about international coordination are coming too late and that there are countries that could make a dramatic difference if they provided more expertise and resources. It did not name the countries. "This is not only an Ebola outbreak - it is a humanitarian emergency, and it needs a full-scale humanitarian response," Lindis Hurum, the group's emergency coordinator in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, said in the statement.

During a training session participants listen as they stand over a mannequin on a stretcher during a training course to instruct non-governmental organisation (NGO) workers and doctors on how to deal with the Ebola virus in Brussels on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2014. The course, provided by Doctors Without Borders, trains volunteer and medical personnel on precautions to take when entering a zone that contains the Ebola virus.

Frieden travels next to Sierra Leone, where the loss of a third senior doctor has raised concerns about the country's ability to fight the outbreak. Dr. Sahr Rogers had been working at a hospital in the eastern town of Kenema when he contracted Ebola, Sierra Leonean presidential adviser Ibrahim Ben Kargbo said Wednesday. Rogers' death marks yet another setback for Sierra Leone, a country still recovering from years of civil war, where there are only two doctors per 100,000 people, according to WHO. By comparison, there are 245 doctors per 100,000 in the United States.

Health workers have been especially vulnerable because of their close proximity to patients, who can spread the virus through bodily fluids. WHO has said that at least 240 health workers have been infected in this outbreak, more than in any other. One of those is an epidemiologist working with the WHO in Sierra Leone, who has been evacuated for treatment in Germany. "The international surge of health workers is extremely important and if something happens, if health workers get infected and it scares off other international health workers from coming, we will be in dire straits," said Christy Feig, director of WHO communications.

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waltky · Aug 29, 2014

Ebola virus rapidly mutating...

Gene Studies of Ebola in Sierra Leone Show Virus Mutating Fast
August 28, 2014 Genetic studies of some of the earliest Ebola cases in Sierra Leone reveal more than 300 genetic changes in the virus as it leapt from person to person, changes that could blunt the effectiveness of diagnostic tests and experimental treatments now in development, researchers said on Thursday.

We found the virus is doing what viruses do. It's mutating, said Pardis Sabeti of Harvard University and the Broad Institute, who led the massive study of samples from 78 people in Sierra Leone, all of whose infections could be traced to a faith healer whose claims of a cure attracted Ebola patients from Guinea, where the virus first took hold. The findings, published in Science, suggest the virus is mutating quickly and in ways that could affect current diagnostics and future vaccines and treatments, such as GlaxoSmithKline's Ebola vaccine, which was just fast-tracked to begin clinical trials, or the antibody drug ZMapp, being developed by California biotech Mapp Biopharmaceutical. The findings come as the World Health Organization said that the epidemic could infect more than 20,000 people and spread to more countries. A WHO representative could not immediately be reached for comment on the latest genetic study.

Study coauthor Robert Garry of Tulane University said the virus is mutating at twice the rate in people as it was in animal hosts, such as fruit bats. Garry said the study has shown changes in the glycoprotein, the surface protein that binds the virus to human cells, allowing it to start replicating in its human host. It's also what your immune system will recognize, he said. In an unusual step, the researchers posted the sequences online as soon as they became available, giving other researchers early access to the data.

Erica Ollmann Saphire of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, has already checked the data to see if it impacts the three antibodies in ZMapp, a drug in short supply that has been tried on several individuals, including the two U.S. missionaries who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone and who have since recovered. It appears that they do not [affect ZMapp], said Saphire, who directs a consortium to develop antibody treatments for Ebola and related viruses. But she said the data will be critical to seeing if any of the other antibodies in our pool could be affected. Saphire said the speed with which Sabeti and colleagues mapped genetic changes in the virus gives researchers information that will also be critical to companies developing RNA-based therapeutics. That could impact treatments under way from Vancouver-based Tekmira Pharmaceuticals and privately-held Profectus BioSciences of Tarrytown, New York.

Part of what makes the data useful is the precise picture it paints as the epidemic unfolded. Sabeti credits years of work by her lab, colleagues at Tulane and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation in developing a response network for Lassa fever, a virus similar to Ebola that is endemic in West Africa. Several of the study authors gave their lives to the work, including Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, the beloved hero doctor from the Kenema Government Hospital, who died from Ebola. The team had been doing surveillance for two months when the first case of Ebola arrived from Guinea on May 25. That case involved a sowei or tribal healer, whose claim of a cure lured sick Ebola victims from nearby Guinea. When she contracted Ebola and died, there were a lot of people who came to her funeral, Garry said. One of these was a young pregnant woman who became infected and traveled to Kenema Government Hospital, where she was diagnosed with Ebola.

With the Lassa surveillance team in place, they quickly began testing samples. We've been able to capture the initial spread from that one person and to follow all of these contacts and everything with sequencing, Garry said. The team used a technique called deep sequencing in which sequences are done repeatedly to generate highly specific results, allowing them to see not only how the virus is mutating from person to person, but how it is mutating in cells within the same person. What is not clear from the study is whether the mutations are fueling the epidemic by allowing the virus to grow better in people and become easier to spread. That will require further tests in the lab, Garry said.

http://www.voanews.com/content/gene...a-leone-show-virus-mutating-fast/2431477.html
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Ebola Vaccine from GSK Fast-tracked into Clinical Trials
August 28, 2014 An experimental Ebola vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline is being fast-tracked into human studies and the company plans to build a stockpile of up to 10,000 doses for emergency deployment, if results are good.

The research work is being accelerated with funding from an international consortium, reflecting mounting concern over the worst outbreak of the disease that has killed more than 1,500 people in West Africa. GSK's candidate vaccine, being co-developed with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), is expected to be given to healthy volunteers in Britain and the United States from about mid-September, with the program then being extended to Gambia and Mali. Britain's biggest drugmaker said on Thursday the Phase I trials would start as soon as they received ethical and regulatory approvals.

The NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is also working on a wider program of clinical trials, including tests of a version of the GSK vaccine that may fight a second strain of Ebola, as well as the West African one. In addition, U.S. researchers plan human tests of a vaccine developed by Canadian government scientists, which has been licensed to NewLink Genetics. The trials being announced will enroll healthy volunteers with the goal of determining whether the vaccine is safe and whether it provokes a protective immune response. The aim is to complete these tests by the end of 2014, after which vaccines could be deployed on an emergency basis.

Race to test

In a grim assessment of the deadly disease, the World Health Organization said on Thursday that the current Ebola outbreak was continuing to accelerate and could infect more than 20,000 people. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity, which is helping to fund the vaccine trials, said the effectiveness of vaccines and drugs could only be assessed during epidemics, so it was vital to test products now. GSK plans to begin making up to about 10,000 additional doses of its vaccine at the same time as the initial clinical trials, so if they are successful vaccine could be made available immediately for an emergency immunization program. NewLink has also contracted for the manufacture of increased supplies of its vaccine.

A steering committee made up of senior officials from NIH and the U.S. Department of Defense also approved last week the first step toward using three advanced laboratories to manufacture Ebola vaccines and treatments, a person familiar with the planning told Reuters. The three labs, in Texas, Maryland and North Carolina, were set up in 2012 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in partnership with private industry to respond to pandemics or chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear threats.. The GSK vaccine consists of a common cold virus, called an adenovirus, that has been engineered to carry two genes of the Ebola virus. Animal testing has shown that when the adenovirus infects cells the Ebola genes produce harmless proteins that stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies to Ebola. GSK acquired the vaccine after buying Swiss-based biotech company Okairos for 250 million euros ($330 million) last year.

http://www.voanews.com/content/reu-...ast-tracked-into-clinical-trials/2430878.html
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waltky · Sep 8, 2014

WHO predicting thousands of new infections...

WHO: Liberia will see thousands of new Ebola cases
Sep 8,`14 -- The United States and Britain will send medical equipment and military personnel to help contain West Africa's Ebola outbreak, as the World Health Organization warned Monday that many thousands of new infections are expected in Liberia in the coming weeks.

The current Ebola outbreak is the largest on record. It has spread from Guinea to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Senegal and killed more than 2,000 people. An "exponential increase" in new cases is expected in the hardest-hit countries in coming weeks, the U.N. health agency warned. "As soon as a new Ebola treatment facility is opened, it immediately fills to overflowing with patients, pointing to a large but previously invisible caseload," WHO said in a statement about the situation in Liberia. "Many thousands of new cases are expected in Liberia over the coming three weeks."

So far, more than 3,500 people have been infected, nearly half of them in Liberia. The outbreak has taken a particularly heavy toll on health workers. The World Health Organization announced Monday that one of its doctors working in Sierra Leone has been infected with Ebola. In response to the spiraling disaster, U.S. President Barack Obama said Sunday that the military would help to set up isolation units and provide security for public health workers responding to the outbreak.

Health workers, attend to patients that contracted the Ebola virus, at a clinic in Monrovia, Liberia, Monday, Sept. 8, 2014. Border closures, flight bans and mass quarantines are creating a sense of siege in the West African countries affected by Ebola, officials at an emergency African Union meeting said Monday, as Senegal agreed to allow humanitarian aid pass through its closed borders.

Military personnel will set up a 25-bed field hospital in the Liberian capital, Col. Steven Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said Monday. The clinic will be used to treat health care workers, a high number of whom have become infected in this outbreak. Once set up, the center will be turned over to the Liberian government. There is no plan to staff it with U.S. military personnel, Warren said. Liberia welcomed the news. "This is not Liberia's particular fight; it is a fight that the international community must engage very, very seriously and bring all possible resources to bear," said Information Minister Lewis Brown.

And Britain will open a 62-bed treatment center in Sierra Leone in the coming weeks. It will be operated by military engineers and medical staff with help from the charity Save the Children, Britain's Department for International Development said Monday. The clinic will also include a special section for treating health care workers, offering them high-quality, specialist care, the statement said. Currently, there are about 570 beds in Ebola treatment centers in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the hardest-hit countries, and the World Health Organization says nearly 1,000 more are needed, the vast majority of those in Liberia.

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Ebola is surging in places it had been beaten back
Sep 8,`14 -- Doctors Without Borders shuttered one of its Ebola treatment centers in Guinea in May. They thought the deadly virus was being contained there.

The Macenta region, right on the Liberian border, had been one of the first places where the outbreak surfaced, but they hadn't seen a new case for weeks. So they packed up, leaving a handful of staff on stand-by. The outbreak was showing signs of slowing elsewhere as well. Instead, new cases appeared across the border in Liberia and then spread across West Africa, carried by the sick and dying. Now, months later, Macenta is once again a hotspot. The resurgence of the disease in a place where doctors thought they had it beat shows how history's largest Ebola outbreak has spun out of control.

It began with people leaving homes in Liberia to seek better care or reunite with families back in Guinea, a pattern repeating itself all over. "Currently in Guinea, all the new cases, all the new epidemic, are linked to people that are coming back from Liberia or from Sierra Leone," said Marc Poncin, the emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Guinea. The epidemic also has touched Nigeria and Senegal while killing more than 2,000 people across West Africa. Never before has the disease struck such a densely populated region, where so many people are on the move. For four decades, the virus struck in relatively remote areas, where doctors could quickly isolate communities and stop its spread.

In previous outbreaks, a cleared pocket like Macenta would be easy to keep clear. This time, the virus is traveling effortlessly across borders by plane, car and foot, shifting from forests to cities and springing up in clusters far from any previously known infections. Border closures, flight bans and mass quarantines have been ineffective. "Everything we do is too small and too late," said Poncin. "We're always running after the epidemic." Ebola has been able to follow its own course because West Africa lacks the health care workers it needs to monitor potential carriers and train communities in how to avoid catching the disease. People in contact with the sick have evaded surveillance, moving at will and hiding their illnesses until they infect others in turn. Whole villages, stricken by fear, have repeatedly shut themselves off for days or weeks, giving the virus more opportunities to whip around and skip someplace else.

Dr. Peter Piot, who co-discovered Ebola, said Ebola isn't striking in a "linear fashion" this time. It's hopping around, especially in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. "The epidemic is now so vast and so extensive that one should consider that in the three (hardest-hit) countries, everybody is now at risk and it won't be over until the last case has survived and six weeks have passed," said Piot, who runs London's School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

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waltky · Sep 9, 2014

A 49% increase in cases in just the last three weeks...

Ebola Cases Spiking in West Africa As Death Toll Nears 2,300
9 Sept.`14 ~ Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone together experienced a 49% increase in cases in just the last three weeks

Cases of Ebola in West Africa are continuing to rise exponentially, with Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone together experiencing a 49% increase in cases in just the last three weeks. New data released Tuesday by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that there are now a total of 4,269 cases in the three countries, including 2,288 deaths. Liberia alone has experienced a 68% increase in cases in the last three weeks. Localized clusters of Ebola have also been emerging in Nigeria and Senegal, where authorities have reported a combined total of 24 cases and eight deaths.

People wait to be admitted into an Ebola treatment facility in Monrovia, Liberia

On Monday, the WHO released data on the troubling number of cases in Liberia, citing concerns that families riding in taxis or motorbikes to hospitals are spreading disease that way. Fourteen of Liberias 15 counties now have confirmed cases of the disease, and so far 152 health care workers have been infected, with 79 dying from the disease. The organization says it expects thousands of new cases in the next three weeks, and has called for all involved parties to at a minimum, triple their efforts. Also on Tuesday, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced that it is helping the African Union mobilize an additional 100 African health workers to help fight the outbreak with $10 million of funding. So far the U.S. has spent a reported $100 million responding to the outbreak.

The WHO has said that Liberia in particular needs better ideas for containing the disease. Conventional Ebola control interventions are not having an adequate impact in Liberia, though they appear to be working elsewhere in areas of limited transmission, most notably in Nigeria, Senegal, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the WHO wrote in a recent update. Dr. Kent Brantly, one of the American Ebola survivors who was infected in Liberia, agrees that regular methods arent working there. In an essay for TIME, Brantly wrote: People are fearful of isolation units because that is where you go to die.Perhaps we need to find a way to provide safe home care that protects the caregivers. Meanwhile in the U.S., Emory University Hospital received a third Ebola patient to its isolation unit on Tuesday morning. This is the fourth patient to be evacuated from West Africa to be treated with the disease in the U.S.

http://time.com/3310226/ebola-guinea-liberia-sierra-leone/
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waltky · Sep 15, 2014

Obama gettin' in the fight against ebola...

Obama to detail plans on Ebola offensive on Tuesday: WSJ
Sun Sep 14, 2014 - U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to detail on Tuesday a plan to boost his country's involvement in mitigating the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

The plan would involve a greater involvement of the U.S. military in tackling the worst recorded outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the proposal. The outbreak has now killed upwards of 2,400 people, mostly in Liberia, neighboring Guinea and Sierra Leone as poorly resourced West African healthcare systems have been overrun.

The U.S. government has already committed around $100 million to tackle the outbreak by providing protective equipment for healthcare workers, food, water, medical and hygiene equipment. Obama could ask Congress for an additional $88 million to fund his proposal, the WSJ reported. Plan details are expected during Obama's visit Tuesday to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The move would come just days after Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf appealed to Obama for urgent aid, saying that without it her country would lose the fight against the disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the epidemic is spreading exponentially in Liberia, where more than half of the deaths have been recorded.

The U.S. military said recently it would build a 25-bed field hospital in Liberia to care for infected health workers but it would hand it to Liberians to run. On Friday, the U.S. Ambassador to Liberia Deborah Malac said Washington would train security forces in isolation operations, after a boy was shot dead last month when Liberian soldiers opened fire on a crowd protesting at a quarantine in a Monrovia neighborhood.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014...HA03C20140915?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews
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Nigeria's Jonathan declares state of emergency over Ebola.....

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