USA TODAY                                   Nov. 11, 2014
By Liz Sazbo
The successful treatment of Westerners with Ebola in the USA and Europe is changing the way doctors think about the disease.

The conventional wisdom about Ebola has been that it's usually fatal, with a mortality rate of up to 90%. That was based largely on experience with Ebola in developing countries in Africa, where many hospitals have no running water and soap, let alone personal protective equipment for the medical staff.

All eight American patients with Ebola treated in the USA have survived. So have most Europeans evacuated to their home countries for care....

With early and aggressive care, "Ebola can be an eminently treatable disease," says Amesh Adalja, senior associate at the Center for Health Security at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

In some ways, Ebola is a different disease in the USA and Europe than it is in Africa, just as cancer is a different disease here than in developing countries, says Jeffrey Duchin, a professor at the University of Washington-Seattle and spokesman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Both conditions are fearsome and dangerous, but experience shows that cancer and Ebola can often be survived if caught early and treated aggressively.

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THE WASHINGTON POST                                                                                        Nov. 11, 2014
By Lena H. Sun, Brady Dennis and Joel Achenbach

The news out of West Africa in recent days — good and bad — has demonstrated a fundamental challenge in the fight against Ebola: The virus is more nimble than the human response to it. The landscape of infection and disease has changed dramatically in recent weeks, even as institutions have largely stuck to blueprints drafted months ago.

Archie C. Gbessay, coordinator of the Active Case Finders and Awareness Team in West Point, a large slum in Monrovia, Liberia, discusses efforts to combat Ebola with his team in a school classroom in September. (Michel du Cille/The Washington Post)

The looming question now is whether governments and other organizations can find a way to become as agile as the virus, which has vanished suddenly in some hard-hit places while erupting just as quickly in new locations.

UPDATE 

New York doctor cleared of Ebola, which means there are no known Ebola cases in the U.S.

WASHINGTON POST                                                                     Nov. 10, 2014

By Mark Herman

The doctor who contracted Ebola in West Africa before returning to New York City has been declared free of the virus, hospital officials announced Monday. This news means that 41 days after the first Ebola diagnosis in the United States, there are no known cases of the virus in the country.

Craig Spencer, 33, who had been treating Ebola patients in Guinea, was diagnosed with Ebola on Oct. 23. Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City, where Spencer was being treated, confirmed in a statement Monday that he “has been declared free of the virus.” Spencer will be discharged on Tuesday, according to the hospital.

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NEW ENGLAND COMPLEX SYSTEMS INSTITUTE                                                                        Oct. 27, 2014
ABSTRACT
By Kia Hall and Yaneer Bar-Yam
The number of cases of Ebola in West Africa has been growing exponentially, and projections assume that this dynamic will continue. However, recent case reports from Liberia indicate a change. The number of new confirmed cases reported by WHO has actually diminished for five weeks in a row.
The WHO report suggests that this may be due to underreporting under conditions of high levels of stress of the number of cases taking place.

Here we report that there appears to be a sound reason for the decreasing number of cases—a change in response strategy that is working. Understanding this dynamic is of critical importance for addressing the outbreak in Sierra Leone and Guinea. In particular the number of cases in Sierra Leone continues to grow exponentially.

Discussions with a WHO response coordinator in Liberia indicates that a change in strategy from individual reporting and contact tracing to community based screening for early detection and population wide behavior change happened in mid September.