The Ebola News Digest

[grower]

One problem with a country wide quarantine would be difficulty in moving medical personnel in to the country to help, as well as supplies. Local quarantines are being employed --

Sarcasm, Godwit. Know it when you see it....

[Godwit]

Sarcasm, Godwit. Know it when you see it....

oops

I do recommend the piece about women caregivers -- that was worthwhile reading
http://bzfd.it/1suQgtQ

[Spike n Ree]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-epidemic.html

Inside the West African ebola towns where locals are quarantined at gunpoint and desperate volunteers are paid £4 to bury the dead

• Volunteers are being paid four pounds a day to sterilize and bury bodies of Ebola victims in Kenema, Sierra Leone
• Rigorous quarantine measures being used to stop the virus spreading, as those affected reaches 2,615 worldwide
• In Liberia, soldiers have created weapon-guarded blockades to ensure thousands of residents stay in quarantine
• Some 20,000 have been left desperate for food as they wait for rationed deliveries to arrive from the government
• The enforced quarantines have created ghost towns around the area, as authorities try to stop spread of the virus

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz3BW5G5BB6
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

[Godwit]

MSF UK Press Office ‏@MSF_Press 8m
PRESS RELEASE: MSF responds to confirmed #Ebola outbreak in Equateur Province, #DRC
http://www.msf.org.uk/article/democr...bola-confirmed …


Crawford Kilian ‏@Crof 4m

MSF on the DR Congo #Ebola outbreak
http://bit.ly/1tAmrej


Bonus reading --
Is This Ebola's Tipping Point?

The appearance of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DR-Congo (not to be confused with the Republic of the Congo, a separate country which sits along the northwest border of DR-Congo) is not a surprise. This is where Ebola first was identified in 1976; the 2014 cases represent the seventh time a new cluster of disease has been seen in this country. Furthermore, the Republic of the Congo, sometimes referred to simply as the Congo, itself has seen three smallish epidemics over the last 38 years.

All of this Ebola activity raises a number of questions, each of them alarming. Is something happening in Africa that is new, along the lines of various Armageddon-like predictions through the years, from the Hot Zone forward, a calamitous and permanent perturbation of the delicate balance between man, animals, and ecosystem, a tipping point, a point of no return? Though this sort of super-simple prognosticating sells lots of books, this scenario is quite doubtful—scary as Ebola feels right now, we are still talking about a relatively slow-moving (2,500 cases in six months) infection that requires intimate contact to transmit. Plus, as cruel as Homo sapiens is to the environment, the small villages such as Gara, where the disease often begins, are hardly places where McDonald’s, Big Oil, and Walmart are turning trees to parking lots.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...ing-point.html

[Godwit]

CDC Director Thomas Frieden, who is in Liberia to assess the Ebola outbreak, said today the contagion is “even worse than we’d feared.”

“This is an absolute emergency,” Frieden told WSB Radio in a phone interview this morning. “We have never seen anything on this scale with Ebola before. Unfortunately, this situation is going to get worse before it gets better. We’ve not yet turned the tide. The outbreak is ahead of our response.”

Frieden, who heads the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Liberia desperately needs to set up treatment centers across the country that can safely handle Ebola patients, giving the patients a chance to survive and also keeping them out of the community, where they can spread the virus to others.

“We’ve seen patients with Ebola with nowhere to go, an increasing number of corpses put onto the street,” Frieden said. “A whole system of picking up and cremating corpses has had to be developed.”

Cremation, which was not culturally acceptable in Liberia before the outbreak, is now widespread practice, the CDC chief said.

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/ebola-o...in-libe/ng85M/

[laughingmanny]

Here is a nice and insulting article...

A poll published today by Harvard School of Public Health and SSRS, an independent research company, shows that many in the United States are unnecessarily worried about an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus here. The major findings were that people with less education, and people who haven’t been following news of the epidemic closely, were the most likely to worry about an outbreak reaching the United States.

The poll found that four in 10—39 percent—of U.S. adults are “concerned” that there will be a large outbreak here . More than a quarter—26 percent—are concerned that they or someone in their immediate family may get sick with Ebola this year.

But this fear is largely misplaced, according to medical experts.

http://www.boston.com/health/2014/08/26/poll-finds-percent-american-adults-fear-ebola-outbreak/Bl8sl9OkTmepdoAWz0CzTL/story.html

Makes one wonder if this is an attempt to once again cast a segment of society as paranoid and/or discredit folks.

[Silverheart]

Here is a nice and insulting article...

A poll published today by Harvard School of Public Health and SSRS, an independent research company, shows that many in the United States are unnecessarily worried about an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus here. The major findings were that people with less education, and people who haven’t been following news of the epidemic closely, were the most likely to worry about an outbreak reaching the United States.

The poll found that four in 10—39 percent—of U.S. adults are “concerned” that there will be a large outbreak here . More than a quarter—26 percent—are concerned that they or someone in their immediate family may get sick with Ebola this year.

But this fear is largely misplaced, according to medical experts.

http://www.boston.com/health/2014/08/26/poll-finds-percent-american-adults-fear-ebola-outbreak/Bl8sl9OkTmepdoAWz0CzTL/story.html

Makes one wonder if this is an attempt to once again cast a segment of society as paranoid and/or discredit folks.

[laughingmanny]

@Silverheart - Funny you posted that.. it's the second time I've seen that image used with reference to this outbreak.

[Godwit]

MicrobiologyBytes ‏@MicroBytes 3m
World struggles to stop Ebola
http://bit.ly/1nCd9bV

[Godwit]

Ian M Mackay, PhD ‏@MackayIM 5m
#DRC index case killed a bush animal and died from an ebolavirus infection 11-Aug. Testing and virus typing ongoing
http://www.afro.who.int/en/clusters-a-programmes/dpc/epidemic-a-pandemic-alert-and-response/outbreak-news/4263-ebola-virus-disease-drc.html …

The index case was a pregnant woman from Ikanamongo Village who butchered a bush animal that had been killed and given to her by her husband. She became ill with symptoms of EVD and reported to a private clinic in Isaka Village. On 11 August 2014, she died of a then-unidentified haemorrhagic fever. Local customs and rituals associated with death meant that several health-care workers were exposed and presented with similar symptoms in the following week.

Between 28 July and 18 August 2014, a total of 24 suspected cases of haemorrhagic fever, including 13 deaths, have been identified. Human-to-human transmission has been established and includes the health-care personnel who were exposed to the deceased pregnant woman during surgery (one doctor and two nurses) in addition to the hygienist and a ward boy, all of whom developed symptoms and died. Other deaths have been recorded among the relatives who attended the index case, individuals who were in contact with the clinic staff, and those who handled the bodies of the deceased during funerals. The other 11 cases are currently being treated in isolation centres.