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Thursday, October 2, 2014

Ebola 10/2

Ebola Infection Rate 'Five an Hour' in Sierra Leone
The NGO Save the Children reported that the rate of infection of Ebola has reached five in one hour (BBC) in Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf dismissed projections of potential infections (AFP) of the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on Wednesday. The CDC announced last week that Ebola could infect as many as 1.4 million in people in Liberia and Sierra Leone by January.
CFR's John Campbell discusses governance issues in West Africa in the fight against Ebola in this CFR video.

Ebola and West Africa: Three Things to Know


Ebola outbreak: 'Five infected every hour' in Sierra Leone


Exclusive: Liberian president dismisses grim Ebola forecasts

http://www.france24.com/en/20141001-exclusive-liberia-president-sirleaf-rejects-new-ebola-cases-predictions-wrong/


EBOLA

The Virus Is Outracing Help
Follow an Ebola burial team into the isolation ward  of a government hospital in Makeni, Sierra Leone. A man’s body is sprawled on the floor. Another man and a 4-year-old girl lay on the floor nearby, dying.

New York Times reporter Adam Nossiter describes the hellish conditions to document how Ebola has outraced the slow massive response from the international community.  As a measure of the Ebola’s lethal speed, Nossiter writes that “Bombali, the district that includes this city, went from one confirmed case on Aug. 15 to more than 190 this weekend, with dozens more suspected.”

This article is one of the most devastating Ebola articles that we’ve read. It shows the on-the-ground reality of Ebola, a horror beyond words.
** The New York Times (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=3e07da755c&e=9c1fcebfa3)

Five New Cases Per Hour
The charity ** Save the Children reports (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=e911b8d267&e=9c1fcebfa3)
that five new Ebola cases occur every hour in Sierra Leone—far outpacing the international response. 765 new cases were reported last week, but the country has only 327 hospital beds.

Save the Children warns the deaths are being "massively unreported."
** BBC (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=dcc0f7a699&e=9c1fcebfa3)

Case Slipped Through the Cracks
The first man to fall ill with Ebola in the US was initially sent home with antibiotics by a Dallas hospital, despite informing them he had recently come from Liberia—and despite measures in place to prevent exactly that scenario.

A couple of days later, he required an ambulance to return to the hospital. Now, health officials are monitoring 12-18 contacts, including 5 schoolchildren and 3 EMS who transported the patient to the hospital by ambulance.

The Quote: "This has meant that nowhere in the entire world is safe; now it's started to be a global pandemic," Liberia's assistant health minister, Tolbert Nyenswah, said in an interview in Monrovia, the nation's capital.
** Los Angeles Times http://jhsph.us3.list-manage2.com/track/click?u= 0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=80733f64af&e=9c1fcebfa3


The Hospital Was Prepared
The Texas hospital treating an Ebola patient says it was prepared. A week earlier, it had just gone over a CDC checklist on screening and isolating patients. Yet a case still got through.
It demonstrates the difficulties of identifying a viral illness that starts with common symptoms—such as fever and headache—that could signal many other illnesses.
It has been a wake-up call for hospitals around the country. A New York City hospital has even borrowed the “secret shopper” model to test its staff—with surprise practice drills stocked with people trained to simulate Ebola symptoms.
** NPR (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=259e0cc7f4&e=9c1fcebfa3)

What’s in a Name?
The Ebola virus, like lots of other maladies—German measles, Lyme disease and Spanish flu, to name a few—was named for its place of origination, or where it was first noticed.
If you say  “Ebola” aloud, you may notice that the long vowels and crisp, hard rhythmic consonants—particular to African languages—reinforce a sense of xenophobia toward the outbreak, pens Randy Malamud, Regents’ Professor of English at Georgia State University.

The Quote: “In the minds of non-Africans—and to our great discredit—the [Ebola] disease seems to be construed largely as exotic, as foreign, as defined primarily by its ‘other’-ness,” says Malamud.
** Salon (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=e16f13b438&e=9c1fcebfa3)


Related: Europe has a moral obligation to repair battered health systems in Africa, not just to stop Ebola but to help improve global health security, said EU Health Commissioner Tonio Borg. ** NPR Goats and Soda (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=55d47eb096&e=9c1fcebfa3)


Related: Scrutiny in Texas to Detect Whether Ebola Has Spread – ** The New York Times (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=a7636103ee&e=9c1fcebfa3)

Related: Area known as 'Ellis Island of Dallas' at the center of Ebola scare – ** The Los Angeles Times (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=e947789a6e&e=9c1fcebfa3)

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