EBOLA VIRUS - Combating Ebola in Liberia

Stopping the spread of Ebola in West Africa

A member of the Church of Aladura prays on the beach in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 20, 2014. He and other church members said they were praying for God to rescue Liberia from its current crisis. The Ebola virus has killed more than 1,200 people in four African nations, with more in Liberia than any other country.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

Members of the Church of Aladura pray on the beach in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 20, 2014. They said they were praying for God to rescue Liberia from its current crisis. The Ebola virus has killed more than 1,200 people in four African nations, with more in Liberia than any other country.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A Liberian Army soldier, part of the Ebola Task Force, beats a local resident while enforcing a quarantine on the West Point slum on Aug. 20, 2014 in Monrovia, Liberia. The government ordered the quarantine of West Point, a congested seaside slum of 75,000, on Wednesday, in an effort to stop the spread of the virus in the capital city. Liberian soldiers were also sent in to the seaside favela to extract West Point Commissioner Miata Flowers and her family members after residents blamed the government for setting up a holding center for suspected Ebola patients to be set up in their community. A mob overran and closed the facility on August 16. The military also began enforcing a quarrantine on West Point, a congested slum of 75,000, fearing a spread of the epidemic.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

Liberian security forces, part of the country's Ebola Task Force, enforce a quarantine on the West Point slum of Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 21, 2014. The quarantine of West Point, a congested favella of 75,000 people, began Wednesday, as the government tries to stop the spread of the virus in the capital city. A mob overran and closed an Ebola isolation ward there on August 16.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A man covers a very sick Saah Exco, 10, in a back alley of the West Point slum of Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 19, 2014. The boy was one of the patients that was pulled out of a holding center for suspected Ebola patients when the facility was breached by protestors Friday night. A local clinic Tuesday refused to treat the boy, according to residents, because of the danger of infection. Saah's mother died of suspected but untested Ebola in West Point, and his brother, Tamba, 6, died on Friday in the holding center.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A Liberian burial team carefully puts on protective clothing before retrieving the body of an Ebola victim from his home near Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 17, 2014. The epidemic has killed more than 1,000 people in four African countries, and Liberia now has had more deaths than any other country.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A Liberian burial team wearing protective clothing retrieves the body of a 60-year-old Ebola victim in his home near Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 17, 2014.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

Workers prepare the new Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Ebola treatment center  near Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 17, 2014. The facility initially has 120 beds, making it the largest such center for Ebola treatment and isolation in history, and MSF plans to expand it to a 350-bed capacity. Tents at the center were provided by UNICEF.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

Supplies await arrivals to the new Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Ebola treatment center near Monrovia, Liberia.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

Hanah Siafa lies with her daughter Josephine, 10, while hoping to enter the new Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Ebola treatment center on August 17, 2014 in Monrovia, Liberia. The facility initially has 120 beds, making it the largest such facility for Ebola treatment and isolation in history, and MSF plans to expand it to a 350-bed capacity. Tents at the center were provided by UNICEF. The virus has killed more than 1,000 people in four African countries, and Liberia now has had more deaths than any other country.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

Liberian police depart after firing shots in the air while trying to protect an Ebola burial team in the West Point slum in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 16, 2014. A crowd of several hundred local residents, chanting, "No Ebola in West Point," drove away the burial team and their police escort. The mob then forced open an Ebola isolation ward and took the patients out, many saying that the Ebola epidemic is a hoax. The isolation center, a closed primary school originally built by USAID, was being used by the Liberian health ministry to temporarily isolate people suspected of carrying the virus. Some 10 patients had "escaped" the building the night before, according to a nurse, as the center had no medicine to treat them.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

People watch as a crowd protests before entering the grounds of an Ebola isolation center in the West Point slum in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 16, 2014.

A mob of several hundred people, chanting, "No Ebola in West Point," opened the gates and took out the patients, many saying that the Ebola epidemic is a hoax. Just moments before they drove off a burial team with police escort, who had tried to take away the bodies of four deceased residents from the neighborhood. The isolation center, a closed primary school originally built by USAID, was being used by the Liberian Health Ministry to temporarily isolate people suspected of carrying the virus.

Some 10 patients had "escaped" the building the night before, according to a nurse, as the center had no medicine to treat them.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A woman wipes her nose after protesters drove out an Ebola burial team who had come to collect the bodies of four people who had died overnight in the West Point slum in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 16, 2014.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A girl sits alone in a cinema in the West Point slum in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 15, 2014. The owner said that few people have come since the Ebola outbreak began.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A security guard looks over the impoverished West Point neighborhood of Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 15, 2014. People in the area suspected of contracting the Ebola virus are being brought by health workers to a temporary isolation center - a closed primary school originally built by USAID, while larger facililities are being constructed to house the surging number of patients.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

Andrew, 14, sits in his one-room home before being taken to an Ebola isolation ward on Aug. 15, 2014 in Monrovia, Liberia.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A mother and child stand atop their mattresses in a classroom now used as Ebola isolation ward  in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 15, 2014. People suspected of contracting the Ebola virus are being brought by Liberian health workers to the center, a closed primary school originally built by USAID, while larger facilities are being constructed to house the surging number of patients.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A Liberian health worker speaks with families in a classroom now used as Ebola isolation ward in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 15, 2014.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A woman cleans the day's catch in the impoverished seaside slum in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 15, 2014. Poor sanitation and close living quarters have contributed to the spread of the Ebola virus, which is transmitted through bodily fluids.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A sick child lies in a classroom now used as Ebola isolation ward  in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 15, 2014.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

Ibrahim Fambulle, left, sick and weak, tries to stand as a corpse lies nearby in an Ebola ward in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 15, 2014.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A girl sells soap as women pray for an end of the Ebola epidemic in Monrovia, Liberia, Aug. 14, 2014.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

Red Cross workers stand near standing water near a newly-opened Ebola isolation ward set up in a school by the Liberian health ministry, which was closed due to the epidemic, Aug. 14, 2014.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

A man lies in a newly-opened Ebola isolation center set up by the Liberian health ministry in a closed school, Aug. 14, 2014 in Monrovia, Liberia. They sleep on mattresses on the floor.

CREDIT: John Moore/Getty Images

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/

EBOLA VIRUS - Ebola case in Senegal raises the alarm

CBS/APAugust 31, 2014, 8:39 AM

A Senegalese hygienist demonstrates how to protect oneself against the Ebola virus on April 8, 2014, at Dakar airport, during a visit of the Senegalese health minister to check the safety measures put in place to fight against the virus' spread in western Africa.  SEYLLOU/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

DAKAR, Senegal - The World Health Organization says it is treating Senegal's first confirmed Ebola case "as a top priority emergency."

In a statement distributed Sunday, the WHO said it would address as quickly as possible Senegal's "urgent need" for support and supplies including personal protective equipment for health workers.

Senegal, a tourist and transportation hub, confirmed its first case of the deadly Ebola disease on Friday, becoming the fifth country in West Africa to be affected by an outbreak that has killed more than 1,500 people. Most of the infections and deaths have been in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.

The patient is a 21-year-old student from Guinea who showed up at a hospital in Dakar on Aug. 26.

Authorities in Guinea had lost track of the student and alerted Senegal on Aug. 27 that he may have crossed into Senegal.

Meanwhile in Sierra Leone, health workers have gone on strike at a major state-run Ebola treatment centre in Sierra Leone, over pay and poor working conditions, hospital staff told Reuters on Saturday.

Clothing to protect health workers being infected is inadequate and there is only one broken stretcher which is used to carry both patients and corpses, a government officials told Reuters.

More than 20 health workers have already died from Ebola at the Kenema health clinic after catching the highly contagious virus from the patients they are fighting to save.

© 2014 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/

AIRCRAFT TRAGEDY - Feds: Plane with unconscious pilot goes into ocean

Associated Press

CHINCOTEAGUE, Va. (AP) — A pilot lost consciousness and the plane drifted into restricted airspace over the nation's capital, scrambling fighter jets that stayed with the small aircraft until it ran out of fuel and crashed Saturday into the Atlantic Ocean, the Coast Guard said.

Crews searched the waters for the single-engine Cirrus plane, which crashed about 50 miles southeast of Chincoteague Island along the Virginia coast, Coast Guard Petty Officer Nate Littlejohn said. The plane took off from Waukesha, Wisconsin, and was headed to Manassas, Virginia, which is about 30 miles southwest of Washington, National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Peter Knudson said.

The Coast Guard was notified about 2:40 p.m. Saturday that the plane failed to land in Manassas and flew into restricted airspace. Two Air Force F16s took to the air and confirmed the pilot was unconscious. They stayed with the plane until it crashed.

No one else was on board.

The plane was registered to Ronald Hutchinson, of Brookfield, Wisconsin. Relatives reached at a phone listing for him didn't want to comment Saturday night.

A Coast Guard helicopter found no sign of the plane before heading back for refueling. A C130 airplane based out of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and an 87-foot cutter from Virginia Beach also were responding, Littlejohn said.

Source: https://my.news.yahoo.com

EBOLA VIRUS - It was already the worst Ebola outbreak in history. Now it’s moving into Africa’s cities.

By Todd C. Frankel August 30 at 7:57 PM

Heath workers wait to screen travelers for fever and other symptoms of Ebola at a checkpoint on the road between Freetown and Kenema in Sierra Leone. (Pete Muller/Prime for The Washington Post)

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — The dreaded Ebola virus came to the children’s hospital in the form of a 4-year-old boy.

His diagnosis became clear three days after he was admitted. The Ola During hospital — the nation’s only pediatric center — was forced to close its steel gates. Fear swelled. The boy died. The 30 doctors and nurses who had contact with him were placed in quarantine, forced to nervously wait out the 21 days it can take for the virus to emerge. And remaining staff so far have refused to return to work. They, along with millions of others, are facing the worst Ebola outbreak in history. Already, the hardest-hit West African nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have reported more than 3,000 cases, including the infections of 240 health-care workers.

Ebola is now spreading from the remote provinces and into the teeming cities such as Freetown, where 1.2 million people jostle for space. Previous outbreaks had been limited to remote vil­lages, where containment was aided by geography. The thought of Ebola taking hold in a major city such as Freetown or Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, is a virological nightmare. Last week, the World Health Organization warned that the number of cases could hit 20,000 in West Africa.

“We have never had this kind of experience with Ebola before,” David Nabarro, coordinator of the new U.N. Ebola effort, said as he toured Freetown last week. “When it gets into the cities, then it takes on another dimension.”

The hemorrhagic fever has no cure. Odds of survival stand at about 50-50. Detection is difficult because early symptoms are hard to distinguish from those of malaria or typhoid, common ailments during the rainy season. While Ebola is not transmitted through the air like the flu, it does spread by close contact with bodily fluids such as blood, saliva and sweat — even something as innocent as a tainted tear.

And so now it is headed to Freetown, where the streets hum with low-level panic. People long ago stopped shaking hands. Hugs are unheard of. Plastic buckets filled with a diluted chlorine solution are posted outside many businesses to encourage hand-washing. Some of these homemade solutions tingle and burn; others smell like aromatic cleansers. For a while, street peddlers, who normally sell peanuts or umbrellas from stacks balanced on their hands, sold surgical gloves, $1 each.

A government health worker keeps tally of those who pass an Ebola quarantine checkpoint. (Pete Muller/Prime for The Washington Post)

A health worker takes the temperature of a child at an Ebola quarantine checkpoint. (Pete Muller/Prime for The Washington Post)

But the roads are still crammed with autos and people, stray dogs and wild chickens. Trucks with loudspeakers rumble down rutted roads.“Wash your hands!” they announce in Krio. “Ebola is real!” shout banners strung throughout the city. Radio ads detail the virus’s symptoms: headache, fever, nausea and vomiting. The Sierra Leonean government has been running these messages in the capital for months, just in case.

Sierra Leone’s first case appeared in late May, in the distant Kailahun district. A month later, the country had 158 total cases. In late July, it was up to 533 cases. A national state of emergency was declared. Soldiers erected roadblocks to cordon off the rural epicenter, raising memories of the country’s brutal civil war, which ended in 2002. Residents were ordered to stay at home for one day of prayer and reflection. An evangelist texted tens of thousands of people before dawn one morning, telling them to douse themselves in saltwater for protection from Ebola. People rushed into the streets, singing and washing.

“It looked like panic,” said Killian Doherty, an Irish architect living in Freetown. “It’s the kind of thing that makes you lose your bearings.”

The government has passed laws to limit close contact, altering the city’s daily rhythms. Riders in the city’s many “Poda Poda” minibuses, usually packed shoulder to shoulder, are now curtailed to four people per row. “Okara” taxi motorbikes are restricted at night. Even banks have cut hours to limit time spent in their crowded lobbies. And large public gatherings have been outlawed. The small cinemas where patrons would pay to watch foreign soccer matches on TVs have been shuttered. The popular clubs along Freetown’s Atlantic Ocean beaches are now empty.

‘People are fed up’

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Nearly half of Sierra Leone’s Ebola cases have been found in the rural Kailahun district.

Residents of the town of Kailahun gather along a river at dusk on Aug. 19, 2014. The Kailahun district in eastern Sierra Leone has been heavily affected by the ongoing Ebola outbreak. School has been suspended, and residents live in fear. View “The Birthplace of an Outbreak.”Pete Muller/Prime for The Washington Post

Recently, a group of 12 men sat on benches under palm trees along Lumley Beach. Technically, this was illegal. The men all knew about Ebola, even reciting how the virus got its name from a Congolese river near where the first outbreak was discovered in 1976. Still, they didn’t know what to think of this strange disease. This country, where doctors are few and over half the population lives in poverty, knows plenty about malaria and cholera and even Lassa fever, a more forgiving hemorrhagic fever spread by rats. But Ebola was new to Sierra Leone.

“I don’t believe 100 percent that Ebola is real,” said Moses Sensie, 32, who works in security for a construction company. The movies he has seen about the virus show victims bleeding out in the disease’s last stages. He hasn’t heard about that happening now, and experts acknowledge hemorrhages in this outbreak have been rare. “I believe in Ebola maybe 60 percent.”

But Anthony Jimmy, 30, was not taking chances. He times his commute to work on the Poda Podas so they are less crowded. He avoids people who look ill. But, he said, the worry was exhausting.

“People are fed up with the situation,” Jimmy said.

Many of the people who can afford to leave Freetown are gone — some on vacation, others to foreign countries to wait out the virus. But getting out has become harder as several airlines have stopped flying to Lungi International Airport. Air France, under orders from the French government, became the latest last week. The nation’s school year is supposed to begin Sept. 9, but few expect that date to hold.

At the Lighthouse Hotel, the usual executives from the mining, pharmaceutical and banking industries are absent. The hotel is running at 15 percent occupancy, said general manager Andrew Damoah. He is barely able to cover the cost of gas for the hotel’s generator — a necessity in a country with a shaky power grid. Most of his guests now are the international doctors and nurses responding to the outbreak.

“We are all running empty hotels,” Damoah said.

‘Everyone is scared’

The city’s hospitals are empty, too. People avoid them over worries about catching Ebola. They would rather suffer at home and hope that what they have is just a mild case of malaria. It is not an unreasonable concern. The Kenema government hospital in the provinces has seen 40 staff members die of Ebola. At Connaught Hospital in Freetown, the doctor running the Ebola ward died two weeks ago. Shortly before that, the government issued a public alert for a 32-year-old hairdresser with an Ebola diagnosis who was pulled from Connaught by her family. They wanted her to be treated by a faith healer. All of them subsequently died of Ebola.

“Everyone is scared. Even I am scared,” said Michael Karoma, a gynecologist who heads Prince Christian Maternity Hospital in Freetown, where is he working to restore the confidence of his staff and the public. “Everyone is afraid of Ebola. This used to be in the villages. Now it is in the cities. What is happening in the world?”

Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma has outlined ongoing challenges and resource deficits in the battle to contain the largest Ebola outbreak in history. (Pete Muller/Prime for The Washington Post)

Connaught Hospital, the city’s main health-care center, is in Freetown’s historic heart, not far from the massive cotton tree featured on Sierra Leone’s paper money. The hospital’s small Ebola isolation ward is part of the nation’s triage system. Patients suspected of having Ebola wait for lab results before being shipped to the country’s only two treatment centers, a facility in Kailahun run by the aid group Doctors Without Borders and the government hospital in Kenema.

At Connaught, the Ebola ward sits behind a gate with prison-like metal bars. Staff members are covered head to toe in protective scrubs. The unit recently had 12 beds for 13 patients. At first, one or two patients were being diagnosed with Ebola each day. That picked up to three a day. Now, lab results on up to seven people a day are coming back positive.

The virus’s march into Freetown was slow to start. The first case officially emerged in mid-
July. Six weeks later, the city had 30. The number is now over 40 and is expected to quickly shoot up.

The Ebola ward at Connaught is now run by Marta Lado, a Spanish doctor who arrived in March. A high-level delegation of World Health Organization officials visited her last week. Nabarro, the United Nations’ new Ebola point man, wanted to know what she needed.

“If you could get anything,” he asked her, “what would it be?”

Lado stood in her sweat-stained blue scrubs and thought.

More people and supplies, she said. “The health-care workers are really scared. This is hard work. We can’t tell them we don’t have enough supplies — to just come to work and later on you’ll have gloves.”

They go through 200 disposable gloves a day in the isolation room. They had enough for now, but the supply was running short.

This wasn’t a problem just at Connaught. Doctors Without Borders has warned about a worldwide shortage of the full-body protective suits worn by Ebola health-care workers. Sierra Leone’s Ebola emergency operations center said it faces a six-week wait for the specialized ambulances needed to transport Ebola patients.

A new Ebola treatment center — the country’s third — is expected to be constructed near Freetown. But it might not be ready for a month. Just outside Freetown in Lakka, a new Ebola isolation unit is almost open, on property shared by a tuberculosis hospital and housing for sufferers of leprosy. A mobile Ebola testing lab, flown in from South Africa, also just started up.

Afraid to admit the truth

Outside the Ebola facility in Lakka, a single Sierra Leonean soldier stood guard, rifle slung over his shoulder. Balla Conteh, 35, did not like his new posting. His younger sister is being treated for Ebola in Kailahun. His 4-month-old niece died of the disease.

“It is real. It is very real. And it is killing people,” Conteh said. “It’s a very, very scary disease.”

That fear might explain how the young boy suffering from Ebola was admitted to Ola During Children’s Hospital.

The boy showed up at the hospital with his father, doctors recall. The child had a fever. He was vomiting and had diarrhea. These were textbook signs of Ebola. But 80 percent of pediatric patients here have similar complaints, usually pointing to malaria or a severe stomach bug, doctors say. They further screened the boy for the virus by asking his father some questions. Any travels? Any funerals? No, no, he said.

The boy was taken to a general ward inside the cramped hospital, which overlooks Destruction Bay on the city’s east end. The hospital’s open windows were covered by sheets to block out the sun and the smell of burning trash. A sign painted in red by the hospital entrance read, “Water from the well in the hospital compound is unsafe for drinking.”

Two days later, the boy’s gums started to bleed. He was transferred to the hospital’s isolation ward. A day later, his lab tests came back. He had Ebola. Doctors delivered the news to the boy’s stepmother and asked again about his travels. The stepmother said the boy had attended his grandmother’s funeral in the provinces.

The father had lied to us, said Sara Hommel, a German pediatrician with a foreign aid group, clearly upset.

She couldn’t understand it. Other doctors, too, have complained about patients not being forthcoming about possible exposure to Ebola. But facing a disease with no cure, perhaps the father and others were afraid to admit the truth.

The hospital had remained closed for several days as the remaining hospital staff members demanded to be taught the infection-control measures considered essential to guarding against this unforgiving virus. “We are not going to rush back to work,” a hospital administrator said. “We want to be protected.”

The wait dragged on. Hommel and another German doctor, Noa Freudenthal, wondered how many cases of malaria or typhoid were going untreated. Ola During once had been filled with 250 patients. Where were these sick children now? Recently, a charity hospital tried to deliver a 2-year-old child suffering from cerebral malaria to the children’s hospital but was turned away. The gates were closed.

And then, one day last week, an infectious disease specialist from the University of California at San Francisco walked into Ola During. Dan Kelly conducted days of training, teaching staff members how to sanitize the floors and how to put on and remove the personal protective gear.

“Fear of Ebola is just permeating everything right now,” Kelly said.

He hoped maybe the training might instill a little confidence.

In the coming days, the children’s hospital is expected to reopen its metal gates.

The only question is whether patients will be too scared to come.

The World Health Organization said Thursday that the outbreak that has ravaged West Africa could infect 20,000 people before it is over.With over 1,500 deaths recorded so far, the virus is certain to claim more lives. At least 3,000 people are believed to have been infected in the current outbreak, but WHO officials believe that the tally could be much higher.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/

EBOLA VIRUS - Five co-authors of latest study killed by virus before their research was published

Five co-authors of the latest study on Ebola were killed by the virus before their research was published, highlighting the huge risks undertaken by those working to combat its spread.

The study, published on Thursday, discovered the virus has mutated many times during the outbreak in West Africa, making establishing a treatment more difficult.

Mbalu Fonnie, Alex Moigboi, Alice Kovoma, Mohamed Fullah and Sheik Umar Khan worked with lead researchers at Harvard University to examine the current outbreak.

Science Mag said all five were experienced members of the Kenema Government Hospital’s (KGH) Lassa fever team. Lassa fever infections have similar symptoms to Ebola.

Their work sequenced the virus genomes from 78 patients and traced the outbreak in Sierra Leone to a funeral of a healer, which a pregnant Kenema Government Hospital Ebola patient and other women who were also infected had attended.

Two months before his death, Mr Khan had described the dangers of treating people with the disease, telling Reuters he feared for his life.

A doctor examines blood samples of Ebola

He said: “I am afraid for my life, I must say, because I cherish my life. Health workers are prone to the disease because we are the first port of call for somebody who is sickened by disease. Even with the full protective clothing you put on, you are at risk.”

More than half of the 3,069 people infected by Ebola have died from the disease, which has spread across Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Nigeria and now Senegal.

The World Health Organisation has warned the current outbreak could infect up to 20,000 people before it ends.

The study, 'Genomic surveillance elucidates Ebola virus origin and transmission during the 2014 outbreak', is published online in Science Magazine.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/