EBOLA: Things to come...

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Ebola death toll hits 7,000 as World Health Organisation misses ambitious targets to contain deadly

Number of people killed by Ebola now stands at 6,928, health agency said. People infected with deadly disease has surpassed 16,000 in West Africa. World Health Organisation had set target of isolating 70 per cent of cases. However, failed to meet December goal it set as virus continues to spread.

(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...

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CDC throws cold water on talk of ‘airborne’ Ebola transmission

Hoping to tamp down fears about Ebola, the Obama administration said Monday the virus wreaking havoc in West Africa is unlikely to mutate and spread by air.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a fact sheet that says samples from the current outbreak, which has killed about 5,000 abroad and elicited fear in the U.S., are nearly identical — 97 percent the same — as the strains studied when Ebola was discovered in 1976.
Scientists monitoring the virus have not seen any evidence that Ebola may be mutating in a way that would make it spread more easily, the CDC said, and changes resulting in new forms of transmission would require multiple mutations over a very long period, anyway.
“As if Ebola isn’t a scary enough disease, some people have wondered whether or not Ebola could mutate and become airborne,” the CDC fact sheet says. “Has it become or could it become an even scarier, more deadly, and more easily spread super-bug?
“No. Scientists have not seen any evidence to suggest that the Ebola virus may be mutating to become more contagious or more easily spread.”
For months, leading scientists have advised Congress and the public that Ebola is spread through direct contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...

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CDC Plans to Monitor over 62,000 for Ebola via RoboCall

The CDC is discussing plans to monitor thousands of people for Ebola. In the Dec 2 Federal Register, the CDC notified the Office of Management and Budget that they plan to monitor over 62,000 people a year who are at risk for Ebola and have entered the US.
The burden of reporting is so overwhelming, that the CDC is proposing using an IVR system (Interactive Voice Response) to track respondents.

(Excerpt) Read more at shtfdashboard.com ...

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The outbreak persists, but Obama’s Ebola Czar is moving on
Hotair ^ |

The height of the Ebola outbreak in Africa, Europe, and the United States also coincided with a period in which the Obama administration came under the heaviest scrutiny over its response to that health crisis. Amid criticism, President Barack Obama rejected calls from lawmakers to impose some travel restrictions on the areas affected by Ebola, but he did say his administration was open to appointing one figure to oversee his government’s response to the crisis.
Days later, Obama appointed Ron Klain, a long-time Democratic political operative and veteran of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns, to serve as the principal figure ensuring that Ebola did not spread any further into the United States.
But Klain’s experience as a partisan political operator with experience handling crisis communications for national campaigns led some critics to believe the Obama administration’s priority for their new Ebola Czar was to manage the bad press they were receiving.
“The president again, wanted somebody who could serve in a coordinating function to manage the implementation of our whole government approach to our Ebola situation,” White House Press Sec. Josh Earnest told CNN’s Jim Acosta in October when asked what Klain’s qualifications for his new position were. “I guess, to more directly address your question, what we were looking for was not an Ebola expert, but rather an implementation expert.”
While the spread of Ebola into the United States has largely been checked in recent weeks, the disease continues to ravage West Africa. In Liberia, where 2,400 American troops are stationed with the task of preventing the outbreak’s further spread, the number of new reported Ebola cases has steadied. That is not the case in places like Sierra Leone, where the number of new cases being reported is accelerating, and medical professionals continue to succumb to the infection.
“The number of people infected with Ebola has passed, 17,000, according to data published Tuesday by the World Health Organization,” ABC News recently reported. “Of those, more than 6,000 have died.”
With this news in mind, the announcement that Ron Klain will soon give up his position as “Ebola Response Coordinator” in order to return to the private sector early next year becomes far less explicable.
Via Fortune Magazine:

Klain has committed to former AOL chief Steve Case that by March 1, he’ll be back on the job as president of Case Holdings and general counsel for Case’s venture firm Revolution LLC, Case tells Fortune. An administration official confirmed the plan.
“He has no intention of staying on in any other capacity here at the White House,” the administration official said. “Ron will do the job for which he was appointed and return to Revolution.”

Case told Fortune reporters that Klain “was not eager to take on this assignment but felt it was an important thing to do.”
“He agreed to do it with the understanding that it would be for a limited period of time,” Case added.
A fair assessment of the work Klain and the emergency personnel and federal planners he managed must concede that they did not fail in preventing Ebola’s further spread inside the United States. To the extent that their work was responsible for isolating the deadly hemorrhagic fever in Africa, they are to be commended.
Is it wise, however, to assume that Klain’s services will no longer be needed by March and that, presumably, the threat of this outbreak will have been neutralized? There are only a few indications that the infection’s spread is decelerating overseas? If Klain’s position already has an expiration date, but the plague’s spread has not been arrested at its source, it would seem to confirm that his appointment was primarily a political maneuver.

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CDC reports potential Ebola exposure in Atlanta lab

As many as a dozen scientists may have been exposed to the Ebola virus at a lab of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, agency officials said Wednesday.
The potential exposure took place Monday when scientists conducting research on the virus at a high-security lab mistakenly put a sample containing the potentially infectious virus in a place where it was transferred for processing to another CDC lab, also in Atlanta on the CDC campus.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...

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Crowds attack Ebola facility, health workers in Guinea

Crowds destroyed an Ebola facility and attacked health workers in central Guinea on rumors that the Red Cross was planning to disinfect a school, a government spokesman said on Saturday.
Red Cross teams in Guinea have been attacked on average 10 times a month over the past year, the organization said this week, warning that the violence was hampering efforts to contain the disease.

(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...

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At least 10 Americans being flown to U.S. after possible Ebola exposure

At least 10 Americans possibly exposed to the deadly Ebola virus were being flown to the United States from Sierra Leone for observation, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Saturday.

(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...

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New Sierra Leone Ebola cases frustrate efforts to end outbreak

Sierra Leone has recorded four new cases of Ebola in a village on its northern border and will likely see more infections in a further setback to efforts to end an 18-month West African epidemic, a senior health official said on Tuesday.
The new cases recorded since the start of the weekend in Sella Kaffta, a village in Kambia District, were all individuals who came into direct contact with a woman who died of the disease late last month.
Pallo Conteh, head of Sierra Leone's National Ebola Response Centre, said the woman's family had failed to notify authorities when she fell ill and instead cared for her themselves.
"I am expecting more cases," he said. "We are sure that the body was washed ... so all those who took part in the washing of the corpse, all those who were helping her when she was having wet symptoms would all become infected."
While soldiers and police have been brought in to ensure that over 1,000 villagers remain in their homes during a quarantine period, Conteh said one individual who had been in contact with the dead woman was still missing.
Authorities were attempting to track her through her telephone communications, he added.
The tradition of washing bodies before burial has been one of the primary sources of transmission over the course of the regional epidemic, which has killed over 11,300 people mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
Intensive information campaigns about the risks of such practices have been partly credited with slowing the progression of the epidemic and even ending the outbreak in Liberia, which was declared Ebola free last week.
"Our people are stubborn," Conteh said. "Until they stop doing what I call the silly things we will have cases popping up here and there."

(Excerpt) Read more at mobile.reuters.com ...

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What first case of sexually transmitted Ebola means for public health
Nature ^ |

It has long been known that the Ebola virus can remain in semen for months after patients have recovered from the disease. But two studies published on 14 October in the New England Journal of Medicine^{1, 2} have raised concerns that sexual transmission of the virus might cause flare-ups of Ebola in West Africa after the region has been declared Ebola-free. Nature explains the implications of the findings.

What did the studies show?

One study¹ recruited 93 men who had survived Ebola in Sierra Leone; they were examined between two and nine months after they first showed symptoms of the disease. Half had Ebola viral RNA in their semen. That was not a complete surprise because traces of the virus are known to linger in semen for many months. Those who first showed symptoms two months ago were most likely to test positive for the RNA. But even in the 43 people who first showed symptoms 7–9 months ago, around one-quarter still had Ebola RNA present in their semen.

(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...