Ebola – Page 2 – praag.org

Rwanda screens US, Spanish visitors for ebola

The East African nation of Rwanda is requiring all visitors from the United States and Spain to self-monitor, fill out an extensive questionnaire and report their medical condition for the first 21 days of their visits because of the Ebola cases that have surfaced in the two Western countries.

Coincidentally or not, the new screening follows an embarrassing uproar in a New Jersey school over the imminent enrollment of two Rwanda children that initially prompted their parents to keep them at home for 21 days.

The order by the Rwanda government to visiting Americans and Spaniards was posted Tuesday on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda:

“On October 19, the Rwandan Ministry of Health introduced new Ebola Virus Disease screening requirements. Visitors who have been in the United States or Spain during the last 22 days are now required to report their medical condition—regardless of whether they are experiencing symptoms of Ebola—by telephone by dialing 114 between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. for the duration of their visit to Rwanda (if less than 21 days), or for the first 21 days of their visit to Rwanda. Rwandan authorities continue to deny entry to visitors who traveled to Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, or Sierra Leone within the past 22 days.”

The U.S. and Spain have both recorded deaths from Ebola. In Dallas, a Liberian national died of the virus two weeks ago and two nurses who treated him tested positive for the virus. At least two Spanish missionaries died in Spain after contracting the disease in West Africa. One Spanish nurse also tested positive for the virus.

Rwanda is located in East Africa about 2,600 miles east of Liberia, the closest of the three West African countries with the Ebola outbreak. Rwanda has been unaffected by the Ebola outbreak on the other side of the continent and has reported no cases of the virus.

The dust-up in New Jersey involving two Rwanda children took a new turn Monday with an apology by the superintendent of the Maple Shade School District in Burlington County.

The children were supposed to begin classes Monday at Howard Yocum Elementary School in Maple Shade, N.J., but ran into a backlash from other parents, WTXF-TV in Philadelphia.com reports.

The uproar started after a school nurse sent a note to staff members saying that the school intended to take the temperature of the two students three times a day for the next 3 weeks, the normal incubation period for Ebola.

Source: USA Today

‘This ebola is a very different bug’

Peter Jahrling of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease is on the front lines fighting this disease in Liberia. He is one of the top authorities in the world on Ebola.

Jahrling believes the current Ebola outbreak may be caused by an infection that spreads more easily than it did before.

Dr Jahrling explained that his team, who are working in the epicentre of the crisis in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, are seeing that the viral loads in Ebola patients are much higher than they are used to seeing.

He told Vox.com: ‘We are using tests now that weren’t using in the past, but there seems to be a belief that the virus load is higher in these patients [today] than what we have seen before. If true, that’s a very different bug.

‘I have a field team in Monrovia. They are running [tests]. They are telling me that viral loads are coming up very quickly and really high, higher than they are used to seeing.

‘It may be that the virus burns hotter and quicker.’

The head of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota – Dr. Michael Osterholm – is a prominent public health scientist and a nationally recognized biosecurity expert.

Dr. Osterholm just gave a talk shown on C-Span explaining that a top Ebola virologist – the Head of Special Pathogens at Canada’s health agency, Gary Kobinger – has found that the current strain of Ebola appears to be much worse than any strain seen before … and that the current virus may be more likely to spread through aerosols than strains which scientists have previously encountered.

The Los Angeles Times reports that dr. C.J. Peters, who battled a 1989 outbreak of the virus among research monkeys housed in Virginia and who later led the CDC’s most far-reaching study of Ebola’s transmissibility in humans, said he would not rule out the possibility that it spreads through the air in tight quarters.

“We just don’t have the data to exclude it,” said Peters, who continues to research viral diseases at the University of Texas in Galveston.

Dr. Philip K. Russell, a virologist who oversaw Ebola research while heading the U.S. Army’s Medical Research and Development Command, and who later led the government’s massive stockpiling of smallpox vaccine after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, also said much was still to be learned. “Being dogmatic is, I think, ill-advised, because there are too many unknowns here.“

A study was conducted back in 2012 that demonstrated that the Ebola virus can be transferred from one animal to another animal without any physical contact whatsoever:

When news broke that the Ebola virus had resurfaced in Uganda, investigators in Canada were making headlines of their own with research indicating the deadly virus may spread between species, through the air.

The team, comprised of researchers from the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease, the University of Manitoba, and the Public Health Agency of Canada, observed transmission of Ebola from pigs to monkeys. They first inoculated a number of piglets with the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus. Ebola-Zaire is the deadliest strain, with mortality rates up to 90 percent. The piglets were then placed in a room with four cynomolgus macaques, a species of monkey commonly used in laboratories. The animals were separated by wire cages to prevent direct contact between the species.

Within a few days, the inoculated piglets showed clinical signs of infection indicative of Ebola infection. In pigs, Ebola generally causes respiratory illness and increased temperature. Nine days after infection, all piglets appeared to have recovered from the disease.

Within eight days of exposure, two of the four monkeys showed signs of Ebola infection. Four days later, the remaining two monkeys were sick too. It is possible that the first two monkeys infected the other two, but transmission between non-human primates has never before been observed in a lab setting.

Ebola: South Africa rejects offer to host 2015 Africa Cup of Nations

Sports authorities of the South African Republic followed the steps of Morocco and also decided against hosting next year’s Africa Cup of Nations biennial football championship, citing concerns over the outbreak of deadly Ebola virus in West Africa.

“The possibility of holding the Africa Cup of Nations is excluded,” South African Sports Minister Fikile April Mbalula said.

South Africa already hosted the Africa Cup of Nations in 2013 in place of Libya, which was torn by the war at that time. “Our budget is incapable of holding the championship in 2015,” Mbalula said. “This is totally impossible.”

Mbalula also said that on top of everything, his country was “facing the task of fighting Ebola.” “We are not immune to it,” the South African sports minister added.

Morocco earlier claimed that it made the decision to cancel hosting the 16-nation football tournament, scheduled to run between January 17 and February 8 next year, as it wanted to avoid holding an event involving countries where Ebola cases were registered, as well as to prevent the expansion of the deadly virus.

Issa Hayatou, the president of the African football’s governing body CAF, arrived in the South Africa Republic last Thursday in order to find a solution to the emerged problem concerning the hosting country.
The CAF earlier stated that it had no plans of postponing or changing the championship’s date of January 17-February 8.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported last week that the Ebola epidemic was spreading geographically and the death toll exceeded the figure of 4,500, while the number of probable and suspected cases exceeded neared 9,000.

Source: ItarTass

Dying for Obama’s deadly dogma

Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of America’s creation.

Africa, Like Trayvon Martin, is extremely important to Barack Obama. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the president said famously about the slain teenager.

His fellow-feelings about the continent the president expressed during the Aug. 4-6 U.S.-Africa Summit this year: “I do not see the countries and peoples of Africa as a world apart; I see Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world – partners with America,” he said.

With the wealth of the most industrious, generous and gullible taxpayer at his disposal, the president believes that it is his duty, first, to stop the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, when, in fact, the duty of the president of the United States is to those who pay the piper.

America’s governing elites habitually betray their constitutional and fiduciary obligations to their constituents. The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom Frieden, and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, claim that restricting entry into the U.S. from the Ebola ground zero is without merit “from a public-health standpoint,” and will only worsen matters.

For whom, pray tell, Dr. Fauci? For American nurses? Cui bono Dr. Frieden?

Contrary to the Frieden-Fauci-Obama obfuscations, it is quite possible to both stop at-risk individuals from entering the U.S., as well as assist in curbing the contagion in the hot-spot countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. The two are not mutually exclusive. While the U.S. welcomes, on average, 150 daily travelers from West Africa, dozens of infection-free African nations have done the sensible thing to contain the spread of the dread disease. The most advanced of them, South Africa, has “restricted entry for all non-citizens traveling from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.”

Obama’s obfuscations about Ebola

Back in South Africa of the mid 1990s, I trained and volunteered as an HIV/AIDS counselor. My last client, before I decamped to North America, was a lovely gay man who had just been diagnosed HIV positive and whose CD4-cell count was already low. He wept in my arms for hours.

My point: Comparing HIV/AIDS to Ebola, as the Frieden-Fauci duo has repeatedly done, amounts to politically correct theatre. For one thing, it is not easy to contract the human immunodeficiency virus. For another, the virus is relatively fragile outside the host. Viral load (or titer) factors into the chances of transmission. It is both easy and cheap to prevent infection. HIV infection rates in Africa have little to do with a lack of resources. Rather, they are associated with violent and unprotected sex irrespective of ample outreach and education.

Ebola is the opposite. It is not difficult to get. The virus doesn’t easily destruct outside the body. And it is hard to stop an Ebola epidemic in West Africa because of the magical thinking that pervades the culture and a lack of infrastructure.

Front men for the CDC and offshoots have obfuscated aplenty about Ebola. However, Dr. Barack “Obola,” who should get that growing proboscis checked out, takes the cake. The president has managed to dispense Ebola advice in direct contradiction to even the CDC’s breezy platitudes: “You cannot get it through casual contact like sitting next to someone on a bus. … Ebola is not spread through the air like the flu. … You cannot get it from another person until they start showing symptoms of the disease, like fever. … You cannot get it from someone who’s asymptomatic.”

In fact, “casual transmission in close quarters, in public spaces is quite possible.” Spending a protracted time within three feet of an infected person is not without risk. Flecks of “viremic” spittle sprayed in your direction from a coughing or animated interlocutor on a bus ride could result in transmission.

Conspiracy or just government SOP?

Be it for jihad or germs, the government prohibits what I’ve termed rational profiling. As to jihad, airport personnel screen everybody alike, grandma from Nebraska and Abdullah from Mecca. As to germs, the CDC advises screening for symptoms of the Ebola disease. If a traveler is “asymptomatic,” CDC guidelines, given with government imprimatur, prohibit the detention or quarantine of nationals or residents from the “hot zone” countries.

All this is in the service of the deadly dogma of political correctness.

As a Liberian living in the devastated capital of Monrovia, Patient Zero (Thomas Eric Duncan), who brought Ebola to the U.S., posed a grave risk to Americans – as do all residents and nationals of countries at the epicenter of the outbreak.

Writing for the Canadian Centre for Research on Globalization, Dr. Jason Kissner hypothesized that the U.S. government refused to isolate Duncan on the basis of his Liberian and Monrovian origins, because it doesn’t want Americans to associate country of origin with an Ebola risk factor, as this could “conceivably completely destroy the One Party State’s immigration reform goals – especially given psychological associations with mystery viruses and other illnesses believed to have arrived from south of the border.”

While I am no conspiracy theorist – never have been – the theory proffered by Kissner seems plausible, if not by design at least by default. Reflexively if not intentionally, government operatives work to retain their positions and increase their sphere of influence. To that end, justifying their mission – open borders and multiculturalism, always – is necessary at all costs.

Gratitude breeds contempt

The index patient aforementioned received exorbitantly expensive, tax-funded care from the dedicated health-care providers of Dallas’ Presbyterian Hospital, two of whom are fighting for their lives. Nevertheless, the family of the late Mr. Duncan has accused his benefactors of racism. Had he survived, Duncan’s own government, promised the Liberian ambassador to the U.S, intended to sue him for lying to Liberian authorities about his exposure to Ebola on a perfunctory screening questionnaire.

Those of us who hail from Africa proper know how conservative Africans truly are. Most Africans would find American moral relativism repugnant. Ambassador Jeremiah Sulunteh has condemned Duncan’s deception. “Our hearts are broken to witness this reckless behavior on the part of Duncan,” lamented the Liberian diplomat, who had nothing but praise for “a country that has been there for Liberia all the way.”

Let’s see, in the capital Monrovia, American Marines are mounting a heroic response to the Ebola outbreak. Stateside, in Maryland, our scientists are developing a vaccine. The Brits will soon land in Sierra Leone with men and medical materiel of their own. Germany, too, is galvanizing its formidable resources. Founded by French physicians, Doctors Without Borders is second to none in alleviating Third World misery.

Yes, Ebola will be defeated by a munificent West. That’s who Africans must thank.

Come to think of it, Obama owes a lot to the same, much-maligned “system.” From financial aid (for foreign students) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of America’s creation. Obama didn’t build what he has; he got it by grant of government privilege.

But like the family of Thomas Eric Duncan, Barack Obama repeatedly demonstrates that gratitude breeds contempt.

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Obama refuses travel ban on black ebola countries

Ann Coulter laments about Obama’s refusal to call a travel ban on black countries that export ebola:

There had never been a case of Ebola in the U.S. until a few months ago. Since then, thousands of people have died of the disease in Africa, and millions upon millions of dollars have been spent treating Ebola patients in the U.S. who acquired it there, one of whom has died.

But the Obama administration refuses to impose a travel ban.

This summer, the U.S. government imposed a travel ban on Israel simply to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu into accepting a ceasefire agreement. But we can’t put a travel restriction on countries where a contagious disease is raging.

It’s becoming increasingly clear this is just another platform for Obama to demonstrate that we are citizens of the world. The entire Ebola issue is being discussed — by our government, not the United Nations — as if Liberians are indistinguishable from Americans, and U.S. taxpayers should be willing to pay whatever it takes to save them.

Maybe we should give them the vote, too! If Ebola was concentrated in Finland and Norway — certainly Israel! — we’d have had a travel ban on Day One.

She also singles out the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Tom Frieden, who likes to joke about ebola and zombies:

Dr. Tom Frieden justifies Obama’s refusal to prohibit flights originating in Ebola-plagued countries, saying, “A travel ban is not the right answer. It’s simply not feasible to build a wall — virtual or real — around a community, city or country.”

What is it with liberals living in gated communities always telling us that fences don’t work? THAT’S WHAT A QUARANTINE IS.

At the congressional hearing on Ebola last week, Republicans repeatedly pressed the CDC representative, Dr. Toby Merlin, to explain why Obama refuses to impose a travel ban.

In about 17 tries, Merlin came up with no plausible answer. Like Frieden, Merlin kept insisting that “the only way to protect Americans” is to end the epidemic in Africa.

Why, precisely, must we attack Ebola in Africa? Research on a cure doesn’t require cuddling victims in their huts. Scientists who discovered the AIDS cocktail didn’t spend their nights at Studio 54 in order to “fight the disease at its source.”

Until there’s a treatment, we can’t put out the disease there, or here. The only thing Americans will be doing in Liberia is changing the bedpans of victims, getting infected and bringing Ebola back to America. When there’s a vaccine, we can mail it.

Coulter believes American troops sent to Liberia are also in grave danger:

Naturally, Obama is sending troops from the 101st Airborne, the pride of our Army, to Liberia. Their general should resign in protest.

Merlin further explained the travel ban, saying that if West Africans can’t fly to America, “that would cause the disease to grow in that area and spill over into other countries.” So instead of infecting people in surrounding countries, our CDC wants them to come here and infect Americans.

But that won’t happen because the government assures us there’s nothing to worry about with Ebola. They’ve got it under control.

Unfortunately, everything the government says about this disease keeps being proved untrue — usually within a matter of days.

They told us that you’d basically have to roll in an infected person’s vomit to catch the disease. Then, nurses at two first-world hospitals in Spain and the U.S. contracted Ebola from patients.

With no evidence, the CDC simply announced that the nurses were not following proper “protocol.” The disease didn’t operate the way CDC said it would, so the hospitals must be lying.

The government told us that national quarantines won’t work, but then they quarantine everyone with Ebola — or who has been near someone with Ebola, such as an entire NBC crew. To me, this suggests that there’s some value in keeping people who have been near Ebola away from people who have not.

Quite obviously, the only way to protect Americans is to prevent Ebola from coming here in the first place. The problem isn’t that Ebola will leap across oceans to infect Americans; it’s that Obama doesn’t want to protect Americans.

At least he’s only putting expendable Americans on the frontlines of the Ebola epidemic — doctors, nurses, members of the 101st Airborne.

At the moment, more than 13,000 West Africans have travel visas to come to the U.S. Having just seen an Ebola-infected Liberian get $500,000 worth of free medical treatment in the U.S., the first thing any African who might have Ebola should do is get himself to America.

Of all the reasons people have for coming here — welfare, drug-dealing, Medicare scams — “I have Ebola and I’m going to die, otherwise” is surely one of the strongest. The entire continent of Africa now knows that this is a country that will happily spend half a million dollars on treating someone who just arrived — and then berate itself for not doing enough.

Thomas Eric Duncan’s family may be upset with his treatment, but they have to admit, the price was right. Medical bill: $0.00. Your next statement will arrive in 30 days.

And now we’re going to have to let in entire families with Ebola, because the important thing is — actually, I don’t know why. It’s some technical, scientific point about fences not working.

Coulter urges Republicans, as well as all Americans, to demand Frieden’s resignation.

US college bans all students from Ebola countries in Africa

“Navarro College is not accepting international students from countries with confirmed Ebola cases.”

It was with shock that 33-year-old Nigerian-American academic Idris Bello read this sentence, signaling the rejection of a friend’s Nigerian brother-in-law to the Texas community college based solely on his citizenship. “I didn’t believe it, I was so surprised. I thought: This cannot be,” Bello says.

A lead entrepreneur in Africa, with a master’s degree in global health from Oxford University, Bello received a copy of the letter from Dr. Kamor Abidogun, a mechanical engineer and friend of his in Houston. Abidogun’s brother-in-law also decided to apply to Navarro, and used his address as the point of contact. Along with the letter he received rejecting his 29-year-old brother-in-law, Abidogun received an identical one for his 20-year-old nephew, who had also decided to apply from Nigeria.

According to the letter, the small community college 20 miles outside of Dallas has decided to stop accepting students from places with confirmed cases of Ebola. Nigeria, it seems, is an odd place to enact that policy. The country of 174 million has only registered 20 total cases of Ebola since the index patient in July, a response so strikingly effective that the CDC dispatched a team to the country to study their methods.

Already through the first 21-day incubation period following the initial cases, the country is now just five days away from being officially declared by the World Health Organization as Ebola-free. Much of the response is believed to center around what WHO has declared “world-class epidemiological detective work,” which traced all 20 cases back to one passenger at the Lagos airport—ironically, an American.

Unlike its three most affected neighboring countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, Nigerian citizens are under no threat of becoming infected with the disease within their borders, or at least no more than the threat we face in our country—and definitely not as much risk as an institution merely minutes away from its own outbreak.

The country of 174 million has only registered 20 total cases of Ebola since the index patient in July, a response so strikingly effective that the CDC dispatched a team to the country to study their methods.

Seven days after receiving the letter from Navarro, Abidogun had yet to break the “bad news” to his brother-in-law and his nephew. Neither applied to other universities. Living in Ibadan, Oyo State, neither are anywhere close to the small epidemic that swept through Nigeria in July—nor have either of them ever visited the most affected countries.

While Bello says he’s faced this kind of misinformed fear himself—he was recently stopped at a gym in Houston and asked if he’s Liberian, for example—he was most shocked to find an actual college making the same judgments. “I’ve had several people in the community act that way, but this is the first time I was going [heard] that from an institution,” says Bello. “An institution of learning, for that matter.”

He wasn’t the only one appalled by the news. When Bello posted the letter on his website, many took to Twitter to express similar feelings of disappointment. “@NavarroCollege so you won’t be accepting any Americans given Texas has confirmed cases? Seems like your enrollment will plummet. #messedup,” wrote one user. “I’m sure they didn’t mind discriminating against students from Africa beforehand, but this just gives them a new easy out,” posted another. “What a gross display of open bias. They descended too low. My brother, just choose another school,” said a third.

For Bello, spreading the message of this case isn’t about Navarro. Instead, it’s about influencing how American universities handle the epidemic in relation to their admissions moving forward. “I understand the fear about Ebola, but we’re not going to tackle epidemics by being scared or by misinformation, it’s going to be true education,” says Bello. “They are teaching students to be leaders in the future. Someone from that school needs to step forward and say, listen we made a mistake we are going to fix that mistake.” – thedailybeast.com

Ebola threatens chocolate industry

Ebola is threatening much of the world’s chocolate supply.

Ivory Coast, the world’s largest producer of cacao, the raw ingredient in M&M’s, Butterfingers and Snickers Bars, has shut down its borders with Liberia and Guinea, putting a major crimp on the workforce needed to pick the beans that end up in chocolate bars and other treats just as the harvest season begins. The West African nation of about 20 million — also known as Côte D’Ivoire — has yet to experience a single case of Ebola, but the outbreak already could raise prices.

The world’s chocolate makers have taken notice.

The World Cocoa Foundation is working now to collect large donations from Nestlé, Mars and many of its 113 other members for its Coca Industry Response to Ebola Initiative. The initiative hasn’t been publicly unveiled, but the WCF plans to announce details Wednesday, during its annual meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, on how the money will fuel Red Cross and Caritas Internationalis work to help the infected and staunch Ebola’s spread.

Ivory Coast, which produces about 1.6 million metric tons of cacao beans per year — roughly 33 percent of the world’s total, according to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization — closed its borders in August to Guinea and Liberia. More than 8,000 have been diagnosed with Ebola, and nearly 4,000 have died in those two countries and Sierra Leone. Next to Ivory Coast is Ghana, the world’s third-largest producer of cacao beans — 879,348 metric tons per year — or 15 percent of the world’s total.

Source: Politico

Ebola patient in Germany dies

A United Nations medical worker who was infected with Ebola in Liberia has died despite “intensive medical procedures,” a German hospital said Tuesday, AP reported.

The St. Georg hospital in Leipzig said the 56-year-old man, whose name has not been released, died overnight of the infection. It released no further details and did not answer telephone calls.

The man tested positive for Ebola on Oct. 6, prompting Liberia’s UN peacekeeping mission to place 41 staff members who had possibly been in contact with him under “close medical observation.”

He arrived in Leipzig for treatment on Oct. 9. The hospital’s chief executive, Dr. Iris Minde, said at the time that there was no risk of infection for other patients, relatives, visitors or the public.

The man was kept in a secure isolation ward specially equipped with negative pressure rooms that are hermetically sealed and can only be accessed through a number of airlocks. All air and fluids are filtered and all equipment is decontaminated after use, Minde said.

The Ebola patient was the third to be flown to Germany for treatment.

The first, a Senegalese man infected with Ebola while working for the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone was brought to a Hamburg hospital in late August for treatment. The man was released Oct. 3 after recovering and returned to his home country, the hospital said.

Another patient, a Ugandan man who worked for an Italian aid group in West Africa, is undergoing treatment in a Frankfurt hospital.

Formaldehyde in water allegedly causing ebola-like symptoms

A man in Schieffelin, Liberia, has been arrested for attempting to put formaldehyde into a well used by the community.

Reports say around 10 a.m., he approached the well with powder in a bottle. Mobbed by the community, he confessed that he had been paid to put formaldeyde into the well, and that he was not the only one. He reportedly told community dwellers, “We are many.” There are are agents in Harbel, Dolostown, Cotton Tree and other communities around the ountry, he said.

State radio, ELBC, reports that least 10 people in the Dolostown community have died after drinking water from poisoned wells.
The man also alleged that some water companies, particularly those bagging mineral water to sell, are also involved. The poison, he said, produces Ebola-like symptoms and subsequently kills people.

The Observer had previously been informed that people dressed as nurses were going into communities with ‘Ebola Vaccines’. Once injected, it reportedly produces Ebola-like symptoms and sends victims into a coma. Shortly thereafter, victims expire. Communities are now reportedly chasing vaccine peddlers out of their communities. After 10 children reportedly died from the ‘vaccine’ in Bensonville, the peddlers were reportedly chased out of the community upon their next visit.

It is possible that the ‘vaccine’ is/was composed of the same formaldehyde-water mixture. This publication has received reports from families whose loved ones’ organs were missing upon return of the bodies to the families. Families suspect an organ trafficking operation is capitalizing on the outbreak of the Ebola virus in Liberia.

The district’s representative condemned the act as barbaric, but called upon Liberians not to doubt the existence of the Ebola virus in the country.

An investigation is ongoing.

Source: The Observer

‘I have ebola, I’ve been to Africa’

Amid cries of racism from black leaders including Jesse Jackson, cases of Ebola have topped 8,000 now, according to official data from the World Health Organization, though many cases could actually be unreported.

The death toll continues to climb near 4,000, and officials have stressed the outbreak is unprecedented and may continue to get worse.

Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price made similar arguments this week that Thomas Duncan, the first patient diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, died because his race and lack of “privilege” kept him from receiving the care he needed.

“It is historical what has happened in this community,” said Mr. Price, who is black. “If a person who looks like me shows up without any insurance, they don’t get the same treatment.”

An American passenger was booted off a US Airways flight and screened after reportedly joking that he had Ebola and telling the rest of the flyers they were “screwed.”

During a flight from Philadelphia to the Dominican Republic, the 54-year-old American – who remains unidentified – reportedly yelled, “I have Ebola, you are all screwed,” according to the Dominican news outlet Diario Libre.

He also yelled out, “I’ve been to Africa!” an airport official told Fox News Latino.

He didn’t yell “bomb,” but he might as well have. After the supposed joke was aired, there was noticeable panic and concern on the airplane, which was carrying 290 passengers. The plane was isolated as soon as it landed in Punta Cana, where a medical team outfitted with hazmat suits boarded the aircraft and removed the passenger.

After conducting a medical check, the passenger was found not to be infected with the virus. Though he was coughing on the flight, he had no fever when he was inspected. He had never been to Africa, either.

In a video captured by a passenger, an African-American can be seen being taken out of the plane by medical officials.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans supported the flight ban, according to a poll conducted in a collaboration between NBC News and SurveyMonkey.

Only twenty percent of respondents did not support a travel ban from the likes of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

As of earlier this week, neither the World Health Organization nor the White House endorsed an all-out travel ban to the US from affected nations.

Airplane cabin cleaning crews at New York’s LaGuardia International Airport began a 24-hour strike on Wednesday, citing, in part, possible exposure to the Ebola virus. Meanwhile, a poll found most Americans want flights banned from Africa.

“The whole country is shivering, worried about the problems of Ebola,” said Hector Figueroa, President of 32BJ Service Employees International Union, according to CBS New York.

Cabin cleaners per plane at LaGuardia have been reduced by up to half, and the time to clean planes has been cut down to as little as five minutes, workers said, as reported by CBS New York.

Ebola death toll nears 4 000 in West Africa: WHO

The worst Ebola outbreak on record has killed 3 879 people out of 8 033 cases by the end of Oct. 5, with no evidence that the epidemic was being brought under control in West Africa, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.

Liberia and Sierra Leone, the two worst-hit countries, still only had 21 percent and 26 percent of the bed spaces they needed, and neighbouring countries had been told to prepare for the disease to spread across their borders, the WHO said.

S. Africa ‘prepared’ for Ebola with 9 hospitals equipped

South Africa is prepared for a potential case of Ebola, the health ministry said on Wednesday in a statement.

“We have identified 11 hospitals around the country to deal with patients who could be affected by Ebola,” spokesman Joe Maila said.

“If anything happens, and someone is discovered to have Ebola, we can send them to these hospitals.”

Such hospitals were equipped with isolation facilities and protective clothing.

The provinces of Gauteng and the Eastern Cape each had two designated hospitals, while the remaining seven provinces had one each.

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi last month rejected assertions that hospitals in the country were not ready to deal with an outbreak of the Ebola virus.

Replying to questions in the National Assembly, Motsoaledi insisted that the 11 hospitals and their staff could deal with Ebola in a professional manner.

“All the designated hospitals have received guidelines on viral haemorrhagic fever and Ebola virus… dealing with all aspects of diagnosis, isolation, treatment and even management of possible fatalities that may occur as a result of the Ebola virus disease,” he said.

According to the latest toll from the World Health Organisation, deaths from the virus amount to 3439 people in West Africa since the start of the year.

While South Africa spends hundreds of billions of rand on health every year from the state budget, much of which gets wasted due to endemic corruption, Motsoaledi nonetheless appealed to private-sector businesses to fund the country’s response to Ebola.

He was due to announce the setting up of an “Ebola response fund” by Friday.

Due to the ANC government’s open-borders policy, millions of people from all over Africa are clustered around South Africa’s major cities, in squalid conditions not far removed from those in West Africa.

Sex could keep Ebola alive

Sex could keep the Ebola epidemic alive even after the World Health Organization (WHO) declares an area free of the disease, one of the discoverers of the deadly virus said on Tuesday.

The WHO is hoping to announce later this week that Nigeria and Senegal are free of Ebola after 42 days with no infections — the standard period for declaring an outbreak over, twice the maximum 21-day incubation period of the virus.

However, it appears the disease can last much longer in semen.

“In a convalescent male, the virus can persist in semen for at least 70 days; one study suggests persistence for more than 90 days,” the WHO said in an information note on Monday.

“Certainly, the advice has to be for survivors to use a condom, to not have unprotected sex, for 90 days,” said Peter Piot, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a discoverer of Ebola in 1976.

“If we would apply the rule for double the time, that would be 180 days — six months. I think it (90 days) is probably a compromise, for practicality,” he told a news conference in Geneva.

Ebola spreads via bodily fluids such as blood and saliva, but it has also been detected in breast milk and urine, as well as semen, the WHO says. The whole live virus has never been isolated from sweat, however.

More than 3,400 people are already known to have died in the world’s worst Ebola outbreak on record, the vast majority of them in three West African countries: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Source: Yahoo

Doctor that discovered ebola fears ‘unimaginable tragedy’

I am more worried about the many people from India who work in trade or industry in west Africa… that really is the apocalyptic scenario

Peter Piot was a researcher at a lab in Antwerp when a pilot brought him a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had fallen mysteriously ill in Zaire. Now, the Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine warns, “around June it became clear to me there was something different about this outbreak. I began to get really worried.

“It is rather medieval. But what can you do? Even in 2014, we hardly have any way to combat this virus… There will certainly be Ebola patients from Africa who come to us in the hopes of receiving treatment. And they might even infect a few people here who may then die… I am more worried about the many people from India who work in trade or industry in west Africa… that really is the apocalyptic scenario.”

The Guardian spoke to Piot.

After Yambuku, you spent the next 30 years of your professional life devoted to combating Aids. But now Ebola has caught up to you again. American scientists fear that hundreds of thousands of people could ultimately become infected. Was such an epidemic to be expected?

No, not at all. On the contrary, I always thought that Ebola, in comparison to Aids or malaria, didn’t present much of a problem because the outbreaks were always brief and local. Around June it became clear to me that there was something fundamentally different about this outbreak. At about the same time, the aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières sounded the alarm. We Flemish tend to be rather unemotional, but it was at that point that I began to get really worried.

Why did WHO react so late?

On the one hand, it was because their African regional office isn’t staffed with the most capable people but with political appointees. And the headquarters in Geneva suffered large budget cuts that had been agreed to by member states. The department for haemorrhagic fever and the one responsible for the management of epidemic emergencies were hit hard. But since August WHO has regained a leadership role.

There is actually a well-established procedure for curtailing Ebola outbreaks: isolating those infected and closely monitoring those who had contact with them.

How could a catastrophe such as the one we are now seeing even happen?

I think it is what people call a perfect storm: when every individual circumstance is a bit worse than normal and they then combine to create a disaster. And with this epidemic there were many factors that were disadvantageous from the very beginning. Some of the countries involved were just emerging from terrible civil wars, many of their doctors had fled and their healthcare systems had collapsed. In all of Liberia, for example, there were only 51 doctors in 2010, and many of them have since died of Ebola.

The fact that the outbreak began in the densely populated border region between Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia …

… also contributed to the catastrophe. Because the people there are extremely mobile, it was much more difficult than usual to track down those who had had contact with the infected people. Because the dead in this region are traditionally buried in the towns and villages they were born in, there were highly contagious Ebola corpses travelling back and forth across the borders in pickups and taxis. The result was that the epidemic kept flaring up in different places.

For the first time in its history, the virus also reached metropolises such as Monrovia and Freetown. Is that the worst thing that can happen?

In large cities – particularly in chaotic slums – it is virtually impossible to find those who had contact with patients, no matter how great the effort. That is why I am so worried about Nigeria as well. The country is home to mega-cities like Lagos and Port Harcourt, and if the Ebola virus lodges there and begins to spread, it would be an unimaginable catastrophe.

Have we completely lost control of the epidemic?

I have always been an optimist and I think that we now have no other choice than to try everything, really everything. It’s good that the United States and some other countries are finally beginning to help. But Germany or even Belgium, for example, must do a lot more. And it should be clear to all of us: This isn’t just an epidemic any more. This is a humanitarian catastrophe. We don’t just need care personnel, but also logistics experts, trucks, jeeps and foodstuffs. Such an epidemic can destabilise entire regions. I can only hope that we will be able to get it under control. I really never thought that it could get this bad.

What can really be done in a situation when anyone can become infected on the streets and, like in Monrovia, even the taxis are contaminated?

We urgently need to come up with new strategies. Currently, helpers are no longer able to care for all the patients in treatment centres. So caregivers need to teach family members who are providing care to patients how to protect themselves from infection to the extent possible. This on-site educational work is currently the greatest challenge. Sierra Leone experimented with a three-day curfew in an attempt to at least flatten out the infection curve a bit. At first I thought: “That is totally crazy.” But now I wonder, “why not?” At least, as long as these measures aren’t imposed with military power.

A three-day curfew sounds a bit desperate.

Yes, it is rather medieval. But what can you do? Even in 2014, we hardly have any way to combat this virus.

Do you think we might be facing the beginnings of a pandemic?

There will certainly be Ebola patients from Africa who come to us in the hopes of receiving treatment. And they might even infect a few people here who may then die. But an outbreak in Europe or North America would quickly be brought under control. I am more worried about the many people from India who work in trade or industry in west Africa. It would only take one of them to become infected, travel to India to visit relatives during the virus’s incubation period, and then, once he becomes sick, go to a public hospital there. Doctors and nurses in India, too, often don’t wear protective gloves. They would immediately become infected and spread the virus.

The virus is continually changing its genetic makeup. The more people who become infected, the greater the chance becomes that it will mutate …

… which might speed its spread. Yes, that really is the apocalyptic scenario. Humans are actually just an accidental host for the virus, and not a good one. From the perspective of a virus, it isn’t desirable for its host, within which the pathogen hopes to multiply, to die so quickly. It would be much better for the virus to allow us to stay alive longer.

Could the virus suddenly change itself such that it could be spread through the air?

Like measles, you mean? Luckily that is extremely unlikely. But a mutation that would allow Ebola patients to live a couple of weeks longer is certainly possible and would be advantageous for the virus. But that would allow Ebola patients to infect many, many more people than is currently the case.

But that is just speculation, isn’t it?

Certainly. But it is just one of many possible ways the virus could change to spread itself more easily. And it is clear that the virus is mutating.

You and two colleagues wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal supporting the testing of experimental drugs. Do you think that could be the solution?

Patients could probably be treated most quickly with blood serum from Ebola survivors, even if that would likely be extremely difficult given the chaotic local conditions. We need to find out now if these methods, or if experimental drugs like ZMapp, really help. But we should definitely not rely entirely on new treatments. For most people, they will come too late in this epidemic. But if they help, they should be made available for the next outbreak.

Testing of two vaccines is also beginning. It will take a while, of course, but could it be that only a vaccine can stop the epidemic?

I hope that’s not the case. But who knows? Maybe.

In Zaire during that first outbreak, a hospital with poor hygiene was responsible for spreading the illness. Today almost the same thing is happening. Was Louis Pasteur right when he said: “It is the microbes who will have the last word”?

Of course, we are a long way away from declaring victory over bacteria and viruses. HIV is still here; in London alone, five gay men become infected daily. An increasing number of bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. And I can still see the Ebola patients in Yambuku, how they died in their shacks and we couldn’t do anything except let them die. In principle, it’s still the same today.