United States

WASHINGTON POST                                                                                          Nov. 17, 2014

By Kevin Sieff

...The doctors who tended to him in Freetown appeared to be unaware that an early Ebola test — taken within the first three days of the illness — is often inconclusive. In a country where information about the disease continues to move slowly, it was another potentially tragic mistake.

In many cases, a negative test at that stage means nothing because “there aren’t enough copies of the virus in the blood for the test to pick up,” said Ermias Belay, the head of the CDC’s Ebola response team in Sierra Leone.

But M’Briwa and others treated the test as definitive, even though Salia remained feverish and weak. The first results were delivered by a team of Chinese lab technicians who had opened a nearby hospital. (The technicians declined Sunday to speak about Salia’s case.)...

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/a-doctors-mistaken-ebola-test-we-were-celebrating--then-everything-fell-apart/2014/11/16/946a84da-6dd5-11e4-a2c2-478179fd0489_story.html

Martin Salia Treated After Being Transported From Sierra Leone

WALL STREET JOURNAL                                     Nov. 16, 2014 ByBetsy McKay and Scott Calvert

“This is an hour-by-hour situation,” said Philip Smith, medical director of the biocontainment unit and a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, the hospital’s academic partner. “He is extremely ill. We have multiple highly-trained specialists who are experts in their fields targeting his most serious medical issues.”

NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE                                                                  Nov. 12, 2014

Eric J. Rubin, M.D., Ph.D., and Lindsey R. Baden, M.D.

The Journal has now published detailed clinical information about three patients transferred from West Africa to the United States or Germany in the midst of their illness.

See details of the treatment

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1412744

NEW YORK TIMES                                                         Nov. 13, 2014

By HELENE COOPER and SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — As the rate of new Ebola infections in Liberia has slowed, American and Liberian officials are debating whether to build all 17 planned Ebola treatment centers in the country or to shift money from the Obama administration that was planned for the centers into other programs to combat future outbreaks.