Related: CDC Says Ebola Can Fly
Also see: Growing unrest sets Liberia back in battle against Ebola
"Death toll from Ebola tops 1,200 as food shortages grow in hard-hit areas" by Alan Cowell | New York Times August 20, 2014
LONDON — As West African nations grappled with the worst-ever outbreak of the Ebola virus, the World Health Organization said Tuesday that the death toll had exceeded 1,200 and announced increased efforts to forestall severe food shortages in areas isolated by quarantines.
Alarm over the disease spread to Germany when a 30-year-old woman at a state employment office was found to have a high fever, a possible symptom of Ebola, and emergency medical personnel ordered her isolated for tests.
Within hours, a statement from the Charité hospital said physicians were inclined to believe that the woman had not been infected with the Ebola virus. While she had returned from Africa eight days ago, health authorities said, she was more likely to be suffering from an infectious illness of the stomach or intestine. But a blood test was being carried out to check for Ebola.
Does anyone believe authority anymore?
A week ago, Europe’s first known death from Ebola was recorded in Madrid, when a 75-year-old Spanish priest, the Rev. Miguel Pajares, died after being evacuated from Liberia, where he had been treating Ebola patients.
The latest figures from the WHO offered a familiar, grim picture of the spread of Ebola, which international health specialists say has been outpacing containment efforts since its identification in West Africa in March.
The only glimmer of relief, albeit faint, came when Reuters quoted Liberia’s information minister, Lewis Brown, as saying that three African doctors treated in his country with a scarce, experimental drug, ZMapp, were showing “remarkable signs of improvement.” There is no licensed cure or vaccine for Ebola, which kills at least half of those infected.
Whatever this agenda is, endgame depopulation or another $windle with the side benefit of introducing martial law authority, the pharmaceuticals will benefit.
The maker manufacturer of the experimental medication, Mapp Biopharmaceutical of San Diego, has already said its limited stock of the drug, enough to treat a half-dozen people, is exhausted. The drug, which consists of antibodies that neutralize the Ebola virus, appears to have helped two American aid workers who contracted the disease in Liberia.
Brown was also quoted in news reports as saying that 17 people being tested for Ebola who were missing from a quarantine center in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, over the weekend had been located. Some reports said they had been transferred to a specialist Ebola treatment center at John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Monrovia, but other accounts said they had checked in there themselves.
The 17 patients fled a temporary holding center when it was ransacked by looters who took bloodstained sheets and mattresses that may carry the Ebola virus. The whereabouts of those items was not immediately clear Tuesday.
Why would they expose themselves to bloodied sheets and stuff? Sounds like a flimsy excuse to explain a further spread.
The disappearance of the patients raised fears that the disease might spread further in the poverty-stricken warren of narrow, muddy alleyways in Monrovia known as West Point. Ebola is transmitted through bodily fluids.
I'm sure it is supposed to.
Brown, the information minister, told Reuters that health specialists planned to go door to door through the neighborhood to explain the perils of the outbreak and the need to isolate people showing symptoms such as fever, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.
At its headquarters in Geneva, the WHO said the number of people who had died in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone had reached 1,229, with 84 new fatalities reported from Aug. 14 to 16, the latest available figures.
The total number of cases was reported as 2,240, an increase of 113 in the same period.
--more--"
"Liberian area resists Ebola quarantine" by Norimitsu Onishi | New York Times August 21, 2014
MONROVIA, Liberia — Liberia’s halting efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak spreading across parts of West Africa quickly turned violent on Wednesday when angry young men hurled rocks and stormed barbed-wire barricades, trying to break out of a neighborhood here that had been cordoned off by the government.
Related: Quarantine
It's only a mind-manipulating, pre-programming movie, right?
Soldiers repelled the surging crowd with live rounds, driving hundreds of young men back into the neighborhood, a slum of tens of thousands in Monrovia known as West Point.
So they WILL KILL YOU if you try to GET OUT!
One teenager in the crowd, Shakie Kamara, 15, lay on the ground near the barricade, his right leg apparently wounded by a bullet from the melee. “Help me,” pleaded Kamara, who was barefoot and wore a green Philadelphia Eagles T-shirt.
Lieutenant Colonel Abraham Kromah, the national police’s head of operations, arrived a few minutes later.
“This is messed up,” he said, looking at the teenager while complaining about the surging crowd. “They injured one of my police officers. That’s not cool. It’s a group of criminals that did this. Look at this child. God in heaven help us.”
Related: Ferguson Residents Fight Instigators
The clashes marked a dangerous new chapter in West Africa’s five-month fight against the Ebola epidemic, the deadliest on record. The virus continues to spread, but already the total number of cases reported in the affected nations in the region — Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone — is higher than in all other Ebola outbreaks combined since 1976, when the disease was first identified, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.
So far, the epidemic has mostly been concentrated in rural areas, but the disease has also spread to major cities like Conakry, Guinea, and Monrovia, the Liberian capital. Fighting Ebola in an urban area — particularly in a place like West Point, an extremely poor and often violent neighborhood that still bears deep scars from Liberia’s 14-year-long civil war — presents challenges that the government and international aid organizations have only started grappling with.
The risks that Ebola will spread quickly, and the difficulties in containing it, are multiplied in a dense urban environment, especially one where the health system has largely collapsed and residents appear increasingly distrustful of the government’s approach to addressing the crisis, experts say.
Has a familiar ring to me.
Many people in West Point were already seething at the government’s attempt to open an Ebola center at a school in their neighborhood, complaining that suspected Ebola patients from other parts of the city were being brought there as well. Their neighborhood, they feared, was effectively being turned into a dumping ground for the disease.
I can understand that, be it ebola or illegal immigrant kids.
On Saturday, hundreds of people stormed the school, carrying off supplies and provoking suspected Ebola patients to flee the facility, heightening concerns that the disease would spread through the city.
On Wednesday, the residents of West Point awoke to learn that their entire area was under government quarantine. Soldiers and police in riot gear blocked roads in and out of the seaside neighborhood. Coast guard officers stopped residents from setting out aboard canoes from West Point, the neighborhood with the highest number of confirmed and suspected cases of Ebola in the capital.
Thank God that could never happen over here in AmeriKa, could it?
I mean, I know they have contingency plans and all, but it's not like war plans that get enacted becau.... uuuuuh, never mind.
As residents realized that the entire area had been sealed off from the rest of the capital, frustrations began to mount. In one midmorning attempt to break through the cordon, at an entrance to the neighborhood next to an electrical station, soldiers fired in the air to dispel the protesters. But some of the bullets appear to have hit the crowd as well, intensifying the sense of a neighborhood under siege.
Beyond the threat of Ebola, experts warn that there has been a broader collapse of the public health system here, resulting in a range of life-threatening illnesses and conditions that are being left untreated as hospitals close and the facilities that remain open become overwhelmed with suspected Ebola cases.
“The emergency within the emergency is the collapse of the health care system,” said Dr. Joanne Liu, the president of Doctors without Borders, who recently surveyed Liberia and other affected nations.
“People don’t have access to basic health care,” she said, including malaria treatment for children, medical care for pregnant women, and other common but essential needs.
I wonder how the 1% are doing today.
--more--"
"Two US Ebola patients released by Atlanta hospital" by Kathleen Foody | Associated Press August 22, 2014
ATLANTA — Calling it a ‘‘miraculous day,’’ an American doctor infected with Ebola left his isolation unit and warmly hugged his doctors and nurses on Thursday, showing the world that he poses no public health threat one month after getting sick with the virus.
Dr. Kent Brantly and his fellow medical missionary, Nancy Writebol, who was quietly discharged two days earlier, are still weak but should recover completely, and no one need fear being in contact with them, said Dr. Bruce Ribner, who runs the infectious disease unit at Emory University Hospital.
Then fear.
Brantly’s reappearance was festive and celebratory, a stark contrast to his arrival in an ambulance under police escort three weeks earlier, when he shuffled into the hospital wearing a bulky white hazardous materials suit.
‘‘I am thrilled to be alive, to be well, and to be reunited with my family,’’ Brantly said, choking up as he read a written statement. Then he and his wife turned to a parade of doctors and nurses, hugging or shaking hands with each one. For some, it was their first direct contact without protective gear.
After Brantly, 33, and Writebol, 59, were infected while working with Ebola victims in Liberia, their charity organizations, Samaritan’s Purse and SIM, reached out to top infectious disease specialists.
They obtained one of only five courses available worldwide of an experimental drug known as Zmapp, and Brantly and Writebol split the doses before being evacuated to Atlanta. The other four were later given to a Spanish priest, who died, and three doctors in Africa, who have been improving.
In Liberia on Thursday, government officials handed out rice and drinking water to residents of an impoverished slum in the capital, Monrovia, where tens of thousands of people have been barricaded in an effort to stop the spread of Ebola.
International aid workers in Liberia warned that more help was needed as the country battles not only the disease but also hunger as travel restrictions have blocked food from getting to parts of the seaside capital.
At least 2,473 people have fallen sick in this outbreak — more than the caseloads of all the previous two-dozen Ebola outbreaks combined, the World Health Organization said.
Brantly did not take questions at Thursday’s news conference, but he did briefly describe how they confronted Ebola in Liberia. He said aid workers had begun ‘‘preparing for the worst’’ after learning of the outbreak in March, and saw their first patient in June. Soon, many more arrived.
He said his team took all the precautions they could. After his wife and children returned to the United States for a family wedding, he focused on work, moving patients to a bigger isolation unit. Three days later, he woke up feeling sick, and was diagnosed with the disease.
‘‘As I lay in my bed in Liberia for the following nine days, getting sicker and weaker each day, I prayed that God would help me to be faithful even in my illness,’’ Brantly said. ‘‘Through the care of the Samaritan’s Purse and SIM missionary team in Liberia, the use of an experimental drug, and the expertise and resources of the health care team at Emory University Hospital, God saved my life.’’
His doctors cautioned that it is unclear whether the drug or a blood transfusion Brantly got from a young Ebola survivor in Africa was helpful or hurtful. The drug is so novel that it has not been tested in people, and might not have made any difference at all.
Doe$n't matter.
‘‘Experimental means exactly that. They are the very first individuals to have received this treatment and frankly we do not know,’’ Ribner said.
Both patients were discharged after their medical team made sure they will not infect others. Their blood tested clean of the virus, which is spread only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of sick people experiencing symptoms. Ebola survivors generally are not contagious once they have recovered.
That may not be true.
Still, both families asked for time alone to recover fully. David Writebol said in a statement that his wife is recuperating at an undisclosed location, and is ‘‘greatly encouraged knowing that there were so many people around the world lifting prayers to God for her return to health.’’
Neither survivor is saying what they will do next. Ribner said there is no concern of a relapse, ‘‘and in fact we would anticipate immunity from this virus if they were treating patients during this outbreak.’’
There is a huge gap between the top-flight care the Americans got at Emory, where a crew of five infectious disease specialists and 21 nurses provided rigorous care, and West Africa, where the virus has killed more than 1,300 people, and even such basics as sterile fluids can be in short supply.
Ribner said he has ‘‘no clue how much they might have spent’’ saving the missionaries’ lives, but he insisted that bringing them to Atlanta ‘‘was the right decision’’ and said the hospital could decide to take more Ebola patients on a case-by-case basis if they are strong enough to survive the long trip.
--more--"
Back over on the continent:
"2 new Ebola cases reported in Nigeria" Associated Press August 23, 2014
ABUJA, Nigeria — Two alarming new cases of Ebola have emerged in Nigeria, widening the circle of people sickened beyond the immediate group of caregivers who treated a dying airline passenger in one of Africa’s largest cities.
And the woman in Germany?
The outbreak also continues to spread elsewhere in West Africa, with 142 more cases recorded, bringing the total to 2,615 with 1,427 deaths, the World Health Organization said Friday.
Most of the new cases are in Liberia, where the government was delivering donated rice to a slum where 50,000 people have been sealed off from the rest of the capital in an attempt to contain the outbreak.
New treatment centers in Liberia are being overwhelmed by patients who were not previously identified. One center with 20 beds opened its doors to 70 possibly infected people, likely coming from ‘‘shadow-zones’’ where people fearing authorities won’t let doctors enter, the UN health agency said.
‘‘This phenomenon strongly suggests the existence of an invisible caseload of patients who are not being detected by the surveillance system,’’ the agency said. This has ‘‘never before been seen in an Ebola outbreak.’’
The two new cases in Nigeria were infected by their spouses, both medical workers who had direct contact with Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, of Minnesota, who flew into Nigeria from Liberia and Togo and infected 11 others before he died in July.
The male and female caregivers also then died of Ebola, Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said Friday.
Nigerian officials initially said the risk of exposure to others was minimal because Sawyer was whisked into isolation after arriving at the airport. Jide Idris, Lagos state health commissioner, later acknowledged that Sawyer was not immediately quarantined.
The two new cases were quarantined two days ago while being tested, Chukwu said. Authorities are now trying to identify and monitor everyone they have been in contact with.
--more--"
You can see where this is all coming, right?
"Boston health authorities unveil Ebola strategy" by Felice J. Freyer | Globe Staff August 20, 2014
It’s extremely unlikely a patient with Ebola will show up in Boston. But if that were to happen, the city is ready to treat that patient and prevent the spread of the disease, according to hospital, city, and EMS officials who spoke at a press briefing Wednesday.
Get the hell out of Boston, although this will allow them to thin out Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan a lot faster.
A patient suspected of having Ebola would be isolated in a hospital room and, even before the infection could be confirmed, health officials would start contacting people who might have been exposed.
Cup of coffee?
Hospitals already have adequate supplies of personal protective equipment to keep the disease from being transmitted to medical workers, and they would activate existing plans for dealing with dangerous infectious diseases.
If disease investigators confirmed a case, the Public Health Commission would tell the public, providing minimal information about the patient to protect privacy.
“The coordination among public health, hospital, and public safety in Boston has been a national model for a very long time, and these strong relationships will serve us well if a case of Ebola virus disease is discovered in the city,” said Barbara Ferrer, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, which held the briefing.
Ferrer said she wanted to reassure the public and correct any misinformation as anxieties grow about the outbreak in West Africa, the worst in history, with nearly 2,500 cases resulting in more than 1,300 deaths.
Although deadly, Ebola does not spread through the air. It is transmitted only through direct contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids, and thus should be easy to contain in nations with advanced health care systems.
“We want to reassure folks that well before there’s any case in Boston, everybody’s been working together to make sure we have a plan in place,” Ferrer said.
I'm not feeling reassured at all.
The city’s health agency has sent guidance to hospitals, health centers, and colleges and universities, advising them on how to recognize and respond to a suspected case of Ebola, Ferrer said.
This has the feeling of $wine flu $windle.
It has also reached out to provide information to West African communities in Boston, providing them with background on the illness, said S. Atyia Martin, director of the commission’s Office of Public Health Preparedness.
The commission has also been in touch with the Massachusetts Port Authority to ensure that “anyone coming into Boston with a suspect disease will be flagged,” said Dr. Anita Barry, director of the commission’s infectious disease bureau.
Dr. Paul Biddinger, chief of the Division of Emergency Preparedness and medical director of Emergency Department Operations at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the hospital has been planning since the 1980s to respond to dangerous diseases.
I'm getting kind of scared.
The West African outbreak has provided “a great chance for us to make sure that we look at all our plans again and make sure we are ready to respond and play a role in the city’s health system,” he said.
HMMMMMMM!
--more--"
"Bill targets hiding of Ebola patients
FREETOWN — Sierra Leone’s Parliament has passed a law imposing possible jail time for anyone caught hiding an Ebola patient, a common practice that the World Health Organization believes has contributed to a major underestimation of the current outbreak. The law, passed Friday, imposes prison terms for violators (AP)."
"Liberian area resists Ebola quarantine" by Norimitsu Onishi | New York Times August 21, 2014
MONROVIA, Liberia — Liberia’s halting efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak spreading across parts of West Africa quickly turned violent on Wednesday when angry young men hurled rocks and stormed barbed-wire barricades, trying to break out of a neighborhood here that had been cordoned off by the government.
Related: Quarantine
It's only a mind-manipulating, pre-programming movie, right?
Soldiers repelled the surging crowd with live rounds, driving hundreds of young men back into the neighborhood, a slum of tens of thousands in Monrovia known as West Point.
So they WILL KILL YOU if you try to GET OUT!
One teenager in the crowd, Shakie Kamara, 15, lay on the ground near the barricade, his right leg apparently wounded by a bullet from the melee. “Help me,” pleaded Kamara, who was barefoot and wore a green Philadelphia Eagles T-shirt.
Lieutenant Colonel Abraham Kromah, the national police’s head of operations, arrived a few minutes later.
“This is messed up,” he said, looking at the teenager while complaining about the surging crowd. “They injured one of my police officers. That’s not cool. It’s a group of criminals that did this. Look at this child. God in heaven help us.”
Related: Ferguson Residents Fight Instigators
The clashes marked a dangerous new chapter in West Africa’s five-month fight against the Ebola epidemic, the deadliest on record. The virus continues to spread, but already the total number of cases reported in the affected nations in the region — Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone — is higher than in all other Ebola outbreaks combined since 1976, when the disease was first identified, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.
So far, the epidemic has mostly been concentrated in rural areas, but the disease has also spread to major cities like Conakry, Guinea, and Monrovia, the Liberian capital. Fighting Ebola in an urban area — particularly in a place like West Point, an extremely poor and often violent neighborhood that still bears deep scars from Liberia’s 14-year-long civil war — presents challenges that the government and international aid organizations have only started grappling with.
The risks that Ebola will spread quickly, and the difficulties in containing it, are multiplied in a dense urban environment, especially one where the health system has largely collapsed and residents appear increasingly distrustful of the government’s approach to addressing the crisis, experts say.
Has a familiar ring to me.
Many people in West Point were already seething at the government’s attempt to open an Ebola center at a school in their neighborhood, complaining that suspected Ebola patients from other parts of the city were being brought there as well. Their neighborhood, they feared, was effectively being turned into a dumping ground for the disease.
I can understand that, be it ebola or illegal immigrant kids.
On Saturday, hundreds of people stormed the school, carrying off supplies and provoking suspected Ebola patients to flee the facility, heightening concerns that the disease would spread through the city.
On Wednesday, the residents of West Point awoke to learn that their entire area was under government quarantine. Soldiers and police in riot gear blocked roads in and out of the seaside neighborhood. Coast guard officers stopped residents from setting out aboard canoes from West Point, the neighborhood with the highest number of confirmed and suspected cases of Ebola in the capital.
Thank God that could never happen over here in AmeriKa, could it?
I mean, I know they have contingency plans and all, but it's not like war plans that get enacted becau.... uuuuuh, never mind.
As residents realized that the entire area had been sealed off from the rest of the capital, frustrations began to mount. In one midmorning attempt to break through the cordon, at an entrance to the neighborhood next to an electrical station, soldiers fired in the air to dispel the protesters. But some of the bullets appear to have hit the crowd as well, intensifying the sense of a neighborhood under siege.
Beyond the threat of Ebola, experts warn that there has been a broader collapse of the public health system here, resulting in a range of life-threatening illnesses and conditions that are being left untreated as hospitals close and the facilities that remain open become overwhelmed with suspected Ebola cases.
“The emergency within the emergency is the collapse of the health care system,” said Dr. Joanne Liu, the president of Doctors without Borders, who recently surveyed Liberia and other affected nations.
“People don’t have access to basic health care,” she said, including malaria treatment for children, medical care for pregnant women, and other common but essential needs.
I wonder how the 1% are doing today.
--more--"
"Two US Ebola patients released by Atlanta hospital" by Kathleen Foody | Associated Press August 22, 2014
ATLANTA — Calling it a ‘‘miraculous day,’’ an American doctor infected with Ebola left his isolation unit and warmly hugged his doctors and nurses on Thursday, showing the world that he poses no public health threat one month after getting sick with the virus.
Dr. Kent Brantly and his fellow medical missionary, Nancy Writebol, who was quietly discharged two days earlier, are still weak but should recover completely, and no one need fear being in contact with them, said Dr. Bruce Ribner, who runs the infectious disease unit at Emory University Hospital.
Then fear.
Brantly’s reappearance was festive and celebratory, a stark contrast to his arrival in an ambulance under police escort three weeks earlier, when he shuffled into the hospital wearing a bulky white hazardous materials suit.
‘‘I am thrilled to be alive, to be well, and to be reunited with my family,’’ Brantly said, choking up as he read a written statement. Then he and his wife turned to a parade of doctors and nurses, hugging or shaking hands with each one. For some, it was their first direct contact without protective gear.
After Brantly, 33, and Writebol, 59, were infected while working with Ebola victims in Liberia, their charity organizations, Samaritan’s Purse and SIM, reached out to top infectious disease specialists.
They obtained one of only five courses available worldwide of an experimental drug known as Zmapp, and Brantly and Writebol split the doses before being evacuated to Atlanta. The other four were later given to a Spanish priest, who died, and three doctors in Africa, who have been improving.
In Liberia on Thursday, government officials handed out rice and drinking water to residents of an impoverished slum in the capital, Monrovia, where tens of thousands of people have been barricaded in an effort to stop the spread of Ebola.
International aid workers in Liberia warned that more help was needed as the country battles not only the disease but also hunger as travel restrictions have blocked food from getting to parts of the seaside capital.
At least 2,473 people have fallen sick in this outbreak — more than the caseloads of all the previous two-dozen Ebola outbreaks combined, the World Health Organization said.
Brantly did not take questions at Thursday’s news conference, but he did briefly describe how they confronted Ebola in Liberia. He said aid workers had begun ‘‘preparing for the worst’’ after learning of the outbreak in March, and saw their first patient in June. Soon, many more arrived.
He said his team took all the precautions they could. After his wife and children returned to the United States for a family wedding, he focused on work, moving patients to a bigger isolation unit. Three days later, he woke up feeling sick, and was diagnosed with the disease.
‘‘As I lay in my bed in Liberia for the following nine days, getting sicker and weaker each day, I prayed that God would help me to be faithful even in my illness,’’ Brantly said. ‘‘Through the care of the Samaritan’s Purse and SIM missionary team in Liberia, the use of an experimental drug, and the expertise and resources of the health care team at Emory University Hospital, God saved my life.’’
His doctors cautioned that it is unclear whether the drug or a blood transfusion Brantly got from a young Ebola survivor in Africa was helpful or hurtful. The drug is so novel that it has not been tested in people, and might not have made any difference at all.
Doe$n't matter.
‘‘Experimental means exactly that. They are the very first individuals to have received this treatment and frankly we do not know,’’ Ribner said.
Both patients were discharged after their medical team made sure they will not infect others. Their blood tested clean of the virus, which is spread only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of sick people experiencing symptoms. Ebola survivors generally are not contagious once they have recovered.
That may not be true.
Still, both families asked for time alone to recover fully. David Writebol said in a statement that his wife is recuperating at an undisclosed location, and is ‘‘greatly encouraged knowing that there were so many people around the world lifting prayers to God for her return to health.’’
Neither survivor is saying what they will do next. Ribner said there is no concern of a relapse, ‘‘and in fact we would anticipate immunity from this virus if they were treating patients during this outbreak.’’
There is a huge gap between the top-flight care the Americans got at Emory, where a crew of five infectious disease specialists and 21 nurses provided rigorous care, and West Africa, where the virus has killed more than 1,300 people, and even such basics as sterile fluids can be in short supply.
Ribner said he has ‘‘no clue how much they might have spent’’ saving the missionaries’ lives, but he insisted that bringing them to Atlanta ‘‘was the right decision’’ and said the hospital could decide to take more Ebola patients on a case-by-case basis if they are strong enough to survive the long trip.
--more--"
Back over on the continent:
"2 new Ebola cases reported in Nigeria" Associated Press August 23, 2014
ABUJA, Nigeria — Two alarming new cases of Ebola have emerged in Nigeria, widening the circle of people sickened beyond the immediate group of caregivers who treated a dying airline passenger in one of Africa’s largest cities.
And the woman in Germany?
The outbreak also continues to spread elsewhere in West Africa, with 142 more cases recorded, bringing the total to 2,615 with 1,427 deaths, the World Health Organization said Friday.
Most of the new cases are in Liberia, where the government was delivering donated rice to a slum where 50,000 people have been sealed off from the rest of the capital in an attempt to contain the outbreak.
New treatment centers in Liberia are being overwhelmed by patients who were not previously identified. One center with 20 beds opened its doors to 70 possibly infected people, likely coming from ‘‘shadow-zones’’ where people fearing authorities won’t let doctors enter, the UN health agency said.
‘‘This phenomenon strongly suggests the existence of an invisible caseload of patients who are not being detected by the surveillance system,’’ the agency said. This has ‘‘never before been seen in an Ebola outbreak.’’
The two new cases in Nigeria were infected by their spouses, both medical workers who had direct contact with Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, of Minnesota, who flew into Nigeria from Liberia and Togo and infected 11 others before he died in July.
The male and female caregivers also then died of Ebola, Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said Friday.
Nigerian officials initially said the risk of exposure to others was minimal because Sawyer was whisked into isolation after arriving at the airport. Jide Idris, Lagos state health commissioner, later acknowledged that Sawyer was not immediately quarantined.
The two new cases were quarantined two days ago while being tested, Chukwu said. Authorities are now trying to identify and monitor everyone they have been in contact with.
--more--"
You can see where this is all coming, right?
"Boston health authorities unveil Ebola strategy" by Felice J. Freyer | Globe Staff August 20, 2014
It’s extremely unlikely a patient with Ebola will show up in Boston. But if that were to happen, the city is ready to treat that patient and prevent the spread of the disease, according to hospital, city, and EMS officials who spoke at a press briefing Wednesday.
Get the hell out of Boston, although this will allow them to thin out Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan a lot faster.
A patient suspected of having Ebola would be isolated in a hospital room and, even before the infection could be confirmed, health officials would start contacting people who might have been exposed.
Cup of coffee?
Hospitals already have adequate supplies of personal protective equipment to keep the disease from being transmitted to medical workers, and they would activate existing plans for dealing with dangerous infectious diseases.
If disease investigators confirmed a case, the Public Health Commission would tell the public, providing minimal information about the patient to protect privacy.
“The coordination among public health, hospital, and public safety in Boston has been a national model for a very long time, and these strong relationships will serve us well if a case of Ebola virus disease is discovered in the city,” said Barbara Ferrer, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, which held the briefing.
Ferrer said she wanted to reassure the public and correct any misinformation as anxieties grow about the outbreak in West Africa, the worst in history, with nearly 2,500 cases resulting in more than 1,300 deaths.
Although deadly, Ebola does not spread through the air. It is transmitted only through direct contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids, and thus should be easy to contain in nations with advanced health care systems.
“We want to reassure folks that well before there’s any case in Boston, everybody’s been working together to make sure we have a plan in place,” Ferrer said.
I'm not feeling reassured at all.
The city’s health agency has sent guidance to hospitals, health centers, and colleges and universities, advising them on how to recognize and respond to a suspected case of Ebola, Ferrer said.
This has the feeling of $wine flu $windle.
It has also reached out to provide information to West African communities in Boston, providing them with background on the illness, said S. Atyia Martin, director of the commission’s Office of Public Health Preparedness.
The commission has also been in touch with the Massachusetts Port Authority to ensure that “anyone coming into Boston with a suspect disease will be flagged,” said Dr. Anita Barry, director of the commission’s infectious disease bureau.
Dr. Paul Biddinger, chief of the Division of Emergency Preparedness and medical director of Emergency Department Operations at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the hospital has been planning since the 1980s to respond to dangerous diseases.
I'm getting kind of scared.
The West African outbreak has provided “a great chance for us to make sure that we look at all our plans again and make sure we are ready to respond and play a role in the city’s health system,” he said.
HMMMMMMM!
--more--"
"Bill targets hiding of Ebola patients
FREETOWN — Sierra Leone’s Parliament has passed a law imposing possible jail time for anyone caught hiding an Ebola patient, a common practice that the World Health Organization believes has contributed to a major underestimation of the current outbreak. The law, passed Friday, imposes prison terms for violators (AP)."
