ASSOCIATED PRESS   By EDITH M. LEDERER                                                         Jan. 15, 2015

UNITED NATIONS --At least 50 Ebola hotspots remain in the three hardest-hit West African countries but new cases are declining and the deadly disease will be defeated, the U.N.'s Ebola chief said Thursday.

The latest report from the World Health Organization showing reductions in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone "is very good news," Dr. David Nabarro said in an interview with The Associated Press.

In the week ending Jan. 11, WHO said Guinea reported its lowest weekly total of new Ebola cases since mid-August. Liberia had its lowest total since the first week of June and no confirmed new cases for the final two days of the week. And new cases in Sierra Leone declined for a second week to the lowest level since the end of August.

But Nabarro cautioned that "there are still numbers of new cases that are alarming, and there are hotspots that are emerging in new places that make me believe there is still quite a lot of the disease that we're not seeing."

 MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERS                                                                       Jan. 13, 2015

In September, 2014, MSF called for states with biological-disaster response capacity to urgently dispatch human and material resources to West Africa, all three of the worst-hit countries have received some assistance from the international community. But foreign governments have focused primarily on financing or building Ebola case management structures, leaving staffing them up to national authorities, local healthcare staff and NGOs.

Across the region, there are still not adequate facilities for isolating and diagnosing patients where they are needed. Other elements that are essential to an Ebola response – such as awareness-raising and community acceptance, safe burials, contact tracing, alert and surveillance, access to health care for non-Ebola patients – are still lacking in parts of West Africa.

Read complete report.

http://www.msf.org/article/ebola-crisis-update-13th-january-2015

REUTERS                                                                         Jan. 9, 2015

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WASHINGTON --The director of the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention said on Tuesday he was "confident" that the Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa can be brought under control but that "we are by no means out of the woods."

Speaking at a breakfast meeting in Washington with public health officials and lawmakers, Dr. Tom Frieden said it is vital that every case of the disease is eliminated.

"I remain very confident we can get to zero cases in this epidemic if we continue the way we're going and nothing unexpected happens," Frieden said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/13/us-health-ebola-frieden-idUSKBN0KM1KG20150113

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USAID: Eyes on Guinea as Liberia, Sierra Leone improve on Ebola

The rate of new Ebola cases in Liberia has plunged, Sierra Leone is beginning to turn the corner in dealing with the deadly virus and health officials are now focused on Guinea, a USAID official said on Tuesday.

CENTER FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASE AND POLICY RESEARCH     by Lisa Schnirring                                 Jan. 9, 2015

The next steps in testing Ebola vaccines as well as a picture of how they might be used in West Africa's outbreak region became clearer today as officials from the World Health Organization (WHO) shared the outcome of yesterday's (Thursday's) high-level meeting in Geneva.

Large phase 3 trials in West Africa's outbreak setting will be next up to see if the vaccines work, with the studies designed to collect more safety data, a task usually covered in phase 2 trials, experts involved in the meeting said today at a WHO media telebriefing. However, as Ebola infections drop off in the outbreak region, scientists face a closing window of opportunity to see how the vaccines perform in a real-life setting.

Experts also signaled a possible role for two Ebola vaccine formulations: a single-dose vaccine providing shorter-term immunity that could be used to tamp down Ebola flare-ups and a prime-boost vaccine that may provide more durable immunity and could be used for other immunization strategies.