This is getting really scary, readers.
"CDC scientist kept quiet about flu blunder, report says" Associated Press August 16, 2014
NEW YORK — A government scientist kept silent about a potentially dangerous lab blunder and revealed it only after workers in another lab noticed something fishy, according to an internal investigation.
The accident happened in January at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. A lab scientist accidently mixed a deadly strain of bird flu with a tamer strain and sent the mix to another CDC lab and to an outside lab in Athens, Ga. Scientists worked with the viral mix for months before it was discovered.
CDC officials have called the incident the most worrisome in a series of lab safety problems at the government agency, long regarded as one of the most respected public health agencies in the world. Earlier this summer, a lab mishandled anthrax samples, and both the bird flu and anthrax labs were shut down.
‘‘We all feel horrible this happened,’’ said Dr. Anne Schuchat, who oversees the CDC’s Influenza Division.
Hopefully no one else will.
Because of employee privacy rules, she said she could not name the lab scientist or the leader of the scientist’s team, who were both faulted in the investigation report released Friday. She said disciplinary actions are taking place, but she did not provide details.
CDC’s release of the report is one of many signs the agency is trying to make things right, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. But he added that the CDC should at least disclose any disciplinary measures, to reassure the public that the agency is taking the matter seriously.
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Related: CDC Slowing Releasing Infectious Agents
But you can trust them them with Ebola!
"Ebola epidemic may be bigger, WHO says" by Nick Cumming-Bruce | New York Times August 16, 2014
GENEVA — West Africa’s deadly Ebola epidemic is probably much worse than the world realizes, with health centers on the front lines warning that the actual numbers of deaths and illnesses are significantly higher than the official estimates, the World Health Organization said.
So far, 2,127 cases of the disease and 1,145 deaths have been reported in four nations — Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone — WHO announced Friday. But the organization has also warned that the actual number is almost certainly higher, perhaps by a very considerable margin.
“Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak,” the group said in a statement Thursday.
The epidemic is still growing faster than efforts to keep up with it, and it will take months before governments and health workers in the region can get the upper hand, Joanne Liu, the president of Doctors Without Borders, said Friday, calling conditions on the ground “like a war.”
The situation “is moving faster and deteriorating faster than we can respond,” Liu told reporters after returning to Geneva a day earlier from a tour of the affected nations.
The epidemic’s front line “is moving, it’s advancing, but we have no clue how it’s going to go around,” Liu said. “Over the next six months we should get the upper hand on the epidemic,” she added, but this was only a “gut feeling” and it would happen only if sufficient resources were put in place.
Many deaths have occurred within local communities, not at health centers, and the known deaths are probably “the tip of the iceberg,” Liu said. “We are still having increasing numbers in most of the sites where we work.”
WHO announced last week that the Ebola epidemic constituted a public health emergency, in a bid to galvanize local and international action. But it has also emphasized that the risk of the epidemic spreading abroad is extremely low.
As countries around the world stepped up precautions for preventing the spread of the disease, the International Olympic Committee announced Friday that athletes from the countries affected by the Ebola outbreak who are attending the Youth Olympic Games in the Chinese city of Nanjing would not be allowed to compete in contact sports or in the swimming pool.
In addition to this step, which would affect three athletes, it said team members from the affected countries would be subject to regular temperature checks and physical assessments.
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"Three in Liberia given scarce Ebola drug" by Sheri Fink | New York Times August 17, 2014
NEW YORK — Three Liberian health care workers who have contracted Ebola received an extremely scarce experimental serum on Friday at a hospital outside the national capital, Monrovia, a Liberian health official said Saturday.
The official, Tolbert G. Nyenswah, an assistant minister of health and social welfare, would not say whether any of the three were doctors.
The drug, a mix of monoclonal antibodies called ZMapp, has been tested in animals but has not been studied for safety or effectiveness in humans. It arrived in Liberia on Wednesday after appeals by leaders there to top officials in the United States and a letter from President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia to President Obama.
Mapp Biopharmaceutical of San Diego, which provided the drug, said the “available supply of ZMapp has been exhausted.”
Nyenswah, who picked up the drug when it arrived at the airport and took part in a meeting to discuss which patients should be selected, said the three recipients had signed consent forms stating that they understood the risks and released all parties involved from liability. He said he did not know how the patients were doing since receiving the drug.
If the treatment works, Nyenswah said in an interview earlier in the week, “and we can save the doctors here, especially those senior medical doctors that are infected with the virus, then Liberia can be a place to do a mass trial with the drugs.”
Liberian health officials requested the serum after it was provided to two US development workers, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, who contracted Ebola while working at ELWA Hospital, the same hospital where the three Liberian health care workers were given the drug.
Brantly and Writebol were evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where they continue to be treated. But a third patient reported to have received ZMapp, Miguel Pajares, a Spanish missionary priest, has died.
Giving ZMapp to foreign aid workers has raised broad ethical questions about the disparities in treatment between white outsiders and the Africans who form the overwhelming majority of victims in the Ebola epidemic.
Brantly wrote on Friday that he was “recovering in every way.” He thanked God for his health care team and for “sparing my life and continuing to heal my body.”
“There are still a few hurdles to clear before I can be discharged,” he said in the statement, released by Samaritan’s Purse, the relief agency where he worked in Liberia. “But I hold on to the hope of a sweet reunion with my wife, children, and family in the near future.”
Mapp Biopharmaceutical provided all the doses at no cost, according to an information sheet on its website.
Getting the serum to Liberia was complicated. Legal and regulatory approval from the US government took several days, frustrating the Liberian health minister, Dr. Walter Gwenigale, friends said.
“He’s got doctors who are dying,” said Steve Radelet, an economic adviser to Johnson Sirleaf and a professor at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. “We were involved in some frantic phone calls trying to connect the dots over the weekend.”
Radelet said Gwenigale wanted to show health professionals, many of whom have contracted Ebola, that “he’s got their backs.”
Gwenigale also reached out to a US consultant to his ministry, Jacob Hughes, the chief executive of Hughes Development, when efforts to obtain the drug slowed last weekend.
“He was just a bit exasperated because they’d been working seven days a week for months, and three days is a long time when you’re waiting for Ebola drugs,” Hughes said. “He called and said: ‘This is our situation. Whatever you can do.’ ”
Johnson Sirleaf said her own phone call with John D. Podesta, a counselor to Obama whose daughter had worked in Liberia, also helped.
She said she also called Gayle Smith, a special assistant to Obama and the senior director for global development and humanitarian issues at the National Security Council. Support also came from the US ambassador to Liberia, Deborah R. Malac.
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NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"Liberian clinic for Ebola patients plundered" by Jonathan Paye-Layleh | Associated Press August 18, 2014
MONROVIA, Liberia — Liberian officials fear Ebola could soon spread through the capital’s largest slum after residents raided a quarantine center for suspected patients and took items including bloody sheets and mattresses.
The violence in the West Point slum occurred late Saturday and was led by residents angry that patients were brought to the holding center from other parts of Monrovia, Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah said Sunday.
Up to 30 patients were staying at the center and many of them fled at the time of the raid, said Nyenswah. Once they are located they will be transferred to the Ebola center at Monrovia’s largest hospital, he said.
West Point residents went on a ‘‘looting spree,’’ stealing items from the clinic that were likely infected, said a senior police official, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the press. The residents took medical equipment and mattresses and sheets that had bloodstains, he said. Ebola is spread through bodily fluids.
‘‘All between the houses you could see people fleeing with items looted from the patients,’’ the official said, adding that he now feared ‘‘the whole of West Point will be infected.’’
Some of the looted items were visibly stained with blood and other bodily fluids, said Richard Kieh, who lives in the area.
The incident creates a new challenge for Liberian health officials who were already struggling to contain the outbreak.
Liberian police restored order to the West Point neighborhood Sunday. Sitting on land between the Montserrado River and the Atlantic Ocean, West Point is home to at least 50,000 people, according to a 2012 survey.
Distrust of government runs high in West Point, with rumors regularly circulating that the government plans to clear the slum out entirely.
Now they have a reason and a device to do it.
Though there had been talk of putting West Point under quarantine should Ebola break out there, Nyenswah said Sunday no such step has been taken. ‘‘West Point is not yet quarantined as being reported,’’ he said.
Ebola has killed 1,145 people in West Africa, including 413 in Liberia, according to the World Health Organization.
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"Finding its natural source is key to Ebola remedy" by Mike Stobbe | Associated Press August 18, 2014
NEW YORK — A scary problem lurks beyond the frenzied efforts to keep people from spreading Ebola: No one knows exactly where the virus comes from or how to stop it from seeding new outbreaks.
Ebola has caused two dozen outbreaks in Africa since it first emerged in 1976. It is coming from somewhere — probably bats — and experts agree they have to pinpoint its origins in nature.
OMG, it is the Contagion movie script being rolled out at you!
That has had to wait until they can tame the current outbreak, which has claimed more than 1,100 lives in four countries — the worst toll from Ebola in history.
‘‘First and foremost get the outbreak under control. Once that piece is resolved, then go back and find what the source is,’’ said Jonathan Towner, a scientist who helped find the bat source of another Ebola-like disease called Marburg. Towner works for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Treat the symptom first? Hmmm.
Others say finding Ebola’s origins is more than a down-the-road scientific curiosity.
Yeah, let's not look at those weapons research facilities in the area.
‘‘Confirming the source would definitely be important,’’ said Dr. Richard Wenzel, a Virginia Commonwealth University scientist who formerly led the International Society for Infectious Diseases.
Throughout history, some of the biggest wins against infectious diseases have involved not just limiting person-to-person spread but also finding and controlling the sources in nature fueling new cases.
Plague was halted after the germ was tied to rat-riding fleas. With the respiratory disease SARS, civet cats played a role. With typhus, it was lice, and with bird flu, live poultry markets. Efforts to control MERS, a virus causing sporadic outbreaks in the Middle East, include exploring the role of camels.
And AIDS was caused by a monkey bite, and honestly I've stopped believe such preposterous, cross-infecting conspiracy theories when the pathogens show all the characteristics of being created in a laboratory. Sorry.
The more outrageous the lie, I suppose the more people they think will believe it. Those days are gone.
In the case of Ebola, health experts think the initial cases in each outbreak get it from eating or handling infected animals. They think the virus may come from certain bats, and in parts of Africa, bats are considered a delicacy.
But bats may not be the whole story or the creature that spread it to humans.
The World Health Organization lists chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys, forest antelope, and porcupines as possibly playing a role. Even pig farms may amplify infection because of fruit bats on the farms, the organization says.
It's the Contagion script again!
Are we all being PRE-PROGRAMMED for the INEVITABLE EVIL of our LEADERS?
‘‘It’s not clear what the animal is. It’s going to take a lot of testing,’’ said Dr. Robert Gaynes, an Emory University infectious disease specialist who worked for the CDC for more than 20 years.
Part of the puzzle is how long the virus has been in West Africa. Previous outbreaks have been in the east and central regions of the continent.
That is where the print ended.
The current outbreak began in rural Guinea, and the first suspected first case was a 2-year-old child who died in Gueckedou prefecture in December, researchers wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine in April. They did not speculate on how the child may have become infected.
Some scientists think the virus has been lurking in the area for years. They point to the case of a lone scientist who got sick in 1994 after doing an autopsy on a wild chimpanzee in Ivory Coast and to a recent study that explored the possibility that past Ebola cases in the region have gone undiagnosed.
Scientists in the United States and Sierra Leone looked back at hundreds of blood samples that were sent to a testing laboratory in eastern Sierra Leone from 2006 through 2008.
The samples initially were checked only for Lassa fever, which is common in West Africa. But when the scientists recently went back and tested for other infections, they found nearly 9 percent was Ebola.
One or more types of Ebola virus have ‘‘probably been there in the mix’’ for some time but for some reason didn’t explode into a widespread epidemic in West Africa until this year, said Stephen Morse, a Columbia University infectious-disease expert.
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