President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia speaks via video on the international response to the Ebola crisis during a Senate subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday. (SAUL LOEB, AFP/Getty Images)
Update Liberian president warns that Ebola still threatens her nation
LOS ANGELES TIMES Dec. 10, 2014
liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf thanked the Obama administration Wednesday for its efforts in stemming the tide of the country’s Ebola outbreak, but warned that the disease was still a threat in her developing nation.
The American response, a combination of funding and military aid, helped galvanize other countries to join the fight against the epidemic in West Africa, she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee over video link.
Airport exit screening in West Africa and entry screening in the United States have identified few persons potentially infected with Ebola virus, according to an article published online December 9 in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Number of travelers arriving from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone who were screened for Ebola at US airports, by state and county of destination (October 11 - November 10, 2014). Source: CDC
Of 80,000 travelers who have departed from West Africa since Ebola-specific screening began, 1993 people have been screened on arrival at one of five US airports. Of those, 86 passengers were referred to the CDC public health officers; only seven have shown symptoms and been referred for evaluation. None eventually wound up with an Ebola diagnosis.
Health care workers have more than 100 times the risk of catching Ebola in Sierra Leone as the general public there does, according to a new report.
And it's not necessarily down to failed protective measures in hospitals. Health care workers form their own community, and when one gets sick or dies, he or she can infect fellow medics, the report finds.
The World Health Organization has been saying that health care workers such as doctors and nurses are at special risk of Ebola. It says 622 health-care workers have been infected and 346 of them have died in all the affected countries.
Dr. Peter Kilmarx of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who led an investigation into the high infection rate in Sierra Leone...said "We think of health care worker infections as a failure of personal protective equipment.,"But there are so many different ways that they are exposed there."
Improvements in health care and other uncertainties make accurate forecasts difficult
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN by Seema Yasim Dec. 8, 2014
A few months ago the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted that up to 1.4 million people in Liberia and Sierra Leone could become infected with Ebola by mid-January. In a recent address to the Senate, CDC director Tom Frieden said that worst-case scenario would not pan out.
That is partly because health care workers in the Ebola hot zone are engaged in a battle to contain the epidemic. It is also because of assumptions about human and viral behavior that are built into the mathematical models used to predict the spread of infectious diseases. Assumptions are inherent in these models. “You take islands of data from different places and build bridges of assumptions that link up all these islands,” says Martin Meltzer, senior health economist at the CDC. Meltzer’s model, which predicted the 1.4 million infections in Liberia and Sierra Leone, worked on the assumption that things would not improve. “Our forecasts are based on the idea that nothing will change,” he says.
REUTERS By Stephanie Nebehay Dec. 9, 2014 GENEVA --More foreign health workers are needed to help tackle the Ebola epidemic, which is spreading quickly in western Sierra Leone and deep in the forested interior of Guinea, a senior U.N. official said on Tuesday.
A woman walks pass an Ebola virus awareness campaign poster in Monrovia, December 8, 2014. Credit: Reuters/James Giahyue
The death toll from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has risen to 6,331 in the three worst hit countries, with Sierra Leone overtaking Liberia as the country with the highest number of cases, the World Health Organization says.
"We know the outbreak is still flaming strongly in western Sierra Leone and some parts of the interior of Guinea. We can't rest, we have to still push on," said David Nabarro, the U.N. Special Envoy on Ebola.
CHICAGO -- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday offered liability protections to drugmakers rushing to develop Ebola vaccines and urged other countries to follow suit.
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia Burwell made the announcement as part of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act in a move aimed at encouraging the development and availability of experimental Ebola vaccines.
The declaration provides immunity under U.S. law against legal claims related to the manufacturing, testing, development, distribution, and administration of three vaccines for the Ebola virus. However, it does not provide immunity for a claim brought in a court outside the United States...
Archived Video - Watch the meeting held on Tuesday, December 9, 2014, from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. (ET).
Speakers: Nancy A. Aossey, President and Chief Executive Officer, International Medical Corps
Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health, Council on Foreign Relations; Author, Ebola: Story of an Outbreak
David Nabarro, Special Envoy on Ebola, United Nations
Presider: Richard E. Besser, Chief Health and Medical Editor, ABC News
Experts recently returned from trips to West Africa with medical teams operating Ebola-treatment units there discuss the situation on the ground and developments in the international response to the crisis.
Decontee Davis: She won her battle with Ebola. Her 5-year-old son, though, paid a price. She didn’t want other kids to suffer the same way, so she embarked on a difficult new job.
washingtonpost.com
Decontee Davis, 23, works at a child-care center, where any of the 13 children could be coming down with Ebola. All are from homes where parents or guardians have been taken away to treatment centers or died of Ebola, and now the youngsters must be monitored for 21 days to determine whether they are infected as well.
The job falls to a staff of 10, all survivors of Ebola like Davis, who watch them 24 hours a day.
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