Tag: Sierra Leone

Ebola is back in Sierra Leone

Two new cases of the deadly Ebola virus have been recorded in Sierra Leone’s capital city of Freetown, about three weeks after the most recent new cases were found, underscoring the difficulty of ridding the region of the disease.

“This is worrisome because we had already closed all Ebola quarantine structures in Freetown since we had gone for weeks without a case,” Sidi Yahya Tunis, a spokesman for the National Ebola Response Centre (NERC) told Reuters. The cases were found in a densely populated slum called Magazine.

Sierra Leone, one of the three West African nations hit hardest during the outbreak, has so far experienced more than 13,000 cases and more than 3,900 deaths. Guinea is still struggling to hit zero cases; Liberia, which at one point last year led all three in the highest number of cases, was declared Ebola-free in May.

Altogether, the three countries have reported more 27,350 cases and more than 11,170 deaths. Overall infections are on the decline, with fewer than 25 cases in Ebola treatment units last week.

Source: Reuters

Is City Press in favour of race war? Reply to Assata Shakur

Publishing a radical exhortation to sedition by a convicted black extremist like Assata Shakur in City Press (Listen up! The European is not your friend) is not only irresponsible, but demonstrates the double standards at work when it comes to freedom of expression in South Africa. If I had written a piece like that, telling white Afrikaners to “use force to break the shackles and obtain emancipation”, the police would have broken down my front door and I would have been charged with “high treason” like the Boeremag and might have been sent to prison for life.

roodt_fbfotoOstensibly her article is about Rhodes’s statue. However, it represents a blanket call to arms against whites or “Europeans” world-wide, especially South Africa’s beleaguered white minority of 8% that is already subject to official hostility, Nazi-style race laws and sustained criminal or ethnic attacks such as the gruesome plaasmoorde (farm murders).

A cursory internet search reveals the following about Shakur: She was born JoAnne Deborah Byron and sentenced for the murder of a white policeman or state trooper, Werner Foerster, in the USA. Not only is she still wanted there as an escaped convict, but she was classified as a “domestic terrorist” by the FBI in 2005 with a price of $1 million on her head.

How come that if you speak out on behalf of the oppressed Afrikaner minority you are marginalised and censored, but an extremist anti-white radical like Shakur has free reign in the mainstream media to stir up racial and ethnic passions?

Apart from the xenophobia playing out on our streets, we also have leukophobia (“fear of whites”) which Shakur openly wants to inflame, causing even more violence than we are already experiencing. Section 16(2) of the 1996 constitution is quite clear that “freedom of expression… does not extend to a. propaganda for war; b. incitement of imminent violence; or c. advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm”.

Obviously, Shakur’s diatribe against us whites contravenes all three sub-sections prohibiting so-called “hate speech”. Many people thought that South Africa was an exception on the continent and that we would not experience African-style ethnic strife, followed by economic collapse as happened in Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Zimbabwe, the DRC and so many other countries. But our leftist media, besotted as they are with concepts like “revolution” and “transformation”, are inciting the same kind of racial and ethnic hatred that has been the bane of Africa since independence. Like the Indians were expelled from Uganda and Malawi, or the Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique, we should ultimately be booted out of South Africa in a glorious act of “black emancipation”.

Some might argue that Shakur is nothing but a caricature of black radicalism, as described in a book from my student days, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Mau-mauing The Flak Catchers. A more sophisticated reader – I daresay “European”! sipping coffee in a café in Paris or Milan – might see it for what it is: a pathetic attempt at fomenting racial revolution from Cuba, one of the last outposts of Marxist dystopia on the planet.

But given that South Africa is already mired in racial and ethnic strife, with axes and knives brandished on our horror-movie streets, its citizens brainwashed with simplistic notions of “white privilege” and “black disadvantage”, Shakur’s discourse could easily lead to civil war. Is that really what City Press and the directors of Naspers, its owners, have in mind for us?


Hundreds of new Ebola cases suspected in Sierre Leone

A three-day lockdown in Sierra Leone has exposed hundreds of potential new cases of Ebola, aiding efforts to bring to an end an epidemic that has already killed 3,000 people in the country.

Officials ordered the country’s 6 million residents to stay indoors or face arrest during the period that ended late on Sunday as hundreds of health officials went door-to-door looking for hidden patients and educating residents about the virus.

Reports to authorities of sick people increased by 191 percent in Western Area, which includes the capital, during the lockdown compared with the previous weekend, said Obi Sesay of the National Ebola Response Center.

“Tests are being carried out on their blood samples, and the results will be in by Wednesday,” Sesay said, adding that 173 of the patients in Freetown met an initial case definition for Ebola.

In the rest of the country, there was a 50 percent increase in sick people reported in the lockdown’s first two days, Sesay said.

Sierra Leone has reported nearly 12,000 cases since the worst Ebola epidemic in history was detected in neighboring Guinea a year ago. In all, more than 10,000 people have died in the two countries plus Liberia.

New cases have fallen since a peak of more than 500 a week in December, but the government said the lockdown, its second, would help identify the last cases and reduce complacency.

A source who declined to be identified said there were 961 death alerts nationwide during the lockdown’s first two days and 495 reports of illness of which 235 were suspected Ebola.

Source: Reuters

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.

ebola-letter

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

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.

UN Security Council declares ebola security threat

The UN Security Council has declared the outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa a “threat to international peace and security”.

The council unanimously adopted a resolution calling on states to provide more resources to combat the outbreak.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned an emergency meeting of the council that the number of Ebola infections was doubling every three weeks.

More than 2,600 people have now died in the worst Ebola outbreak on record.

Cases doubling
Mr Ban said the “gravity and scale of the situation now require a level of international action unprecedented for a health emergency”.

He announced the establishment of an “emergency UN mission” working with the World Health Organization (WHO) to combat the crisis, saying he would convene a “high-level meeting” next week.

The council heard that the international response had to be three times bigger than it was now to contain the crisis – the number of cases is doubling every two weeks in west Africa.

The resolution attracted 130 co-sponsors – a UN record – and calls on countries to provide urgent aid, such as medical staff and field hospitals.

The resolution also calls for travel bans imposed by some states to be lifted, saying the countries need to have access to aid instead of being isolated.

Council members heard that the international response would need to be 20 times greater than it was now, if the outbreak were to be controlled.

The Security Council has never previously met to confront a public health crisis, reports the BBC’s Nick Bryant from New York.

It is only the second time that a public health issue has been addressed at the council, the first instance being HIV/Aids, our correspondent adds.

A doctor appearing via video link from Liberia warned that if the international community did not step up its response, “we would be wiped out”.

Officials in Guinea searching for a team of health workers and journalists who went missing while trying to raise awareness of Ebola have found several bodies.

A spokesman for Guinea’s government said the bodies included those of three journalists in the team.

They went missing after being attacked on Tuesday in a village near the southern city of Nzerekore.

Meanwhile Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma said the disease would be soon be a thing of the past within the next couple of weeks.

Smiling broadly, the president said the international community “are not only in the fight but also involved in the preparation work”.

He said Britain was establishing an Ebola treatment centre at Kerry Town on the Freetown peninsula, the Chinese were setting up one at Jui just outside Freetown and the Americans had “increased their presence” through the Centres for Disease Control.

“I will say that their presence has improved” he said, and the collaboration would continue to “ensure that [by] the next couple of weeks we will be able to contain Ebola”.

“I am sure that we will get Ebola behind us very soon” he said, assuring the country would get back to “normalcy in December”.

By normalcy, he explained, Ebola would be contained and his government would return to implementing those “development programmes we were carrying out before the May outbreak” .

He said Ebola would be a thing of the past earlier than the six-month timeframe given by the French charity MSF and other agencies.

World War E

As the unprecedented Ebola outbreak in West Africa, dubbed “World War E,” rages out of control, the United Nations is admitting the approximately 6,000 peacekeepers still in Liberia are not trained in health-care operations.

The acknowledgement comes after a top German virologist told reporters Friday he does not expect the Ebola virus to burn out in Liberia or Sierra Leone until it infects half the population of the two countries and kills 5 million people.

Confirmed cases of Ebola have increased 57 percent in the past three weeks, with the death toll currently at 1,296 and no end in sight, according to updated World Health Organization statistics.

Jones Schmidt-Chanasit, the director of viral diagnostics at the Bernhard Nocht Institute of Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, told the international press Friday he and his colleagues have lost all hope of halting the spread of the virus in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

“We lost the possibility of controlling this Ebola outbreak in those two countries back in May or June,” Schmidt-Chanasit said.

The Ebola outbreak in Liberia has not been slowed by the more than 8,000 U.N. personnel currently in Libya, including 6,000 uniformed peacekeepers. According to U.N. records, there are 4,460 troops, 126 military observers and 1,434 police forces, with an approved budget from July 2014 through June 2015 of $427.3 million.

Last week, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Hervé Ladsous addressed media in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, vowing the U.N. will continue to stand by Liberia as it battles an “unprecedented” Ebola outbreak. He said the peacekeepers will be “standing by Liberia through good and bad times.”

Some 95 percent of the expatriate doctors left when the Ebola outbreak began in March, leaving 50 physicians to treat the country’s 4.3 million population.

Ladsous, according to the U.N. News Center, emphasized that a peacekeeping mission is not a public health mission, stressing that handling the Ebola outbreak is “not something we are trained for.”

“It is true that we, the international community, have invested a lot over the years to bring back peace and security to Liberia, and, more generally, to West Africa. And it is even more true that we do not want to jeopardize that patient work,” stated Ladsous.

He added that while the UNMIL, the United Nations Mission in Liberia, is not a public health operator, the mission and the wider U.N. system would be on hand to ensure Liberia overcome the crisis.

“You have seen the very public and proactive position taken by the secretary-general … who has given orders to the entire U.N. system to mobilize in comprehensive, strategic [and] concrete ways to support efforts to stem the epidemic,” he said.

The civil war that raged from 1989 to 2003 left Liberia with 250,000 dead, the country in economic ruin and overrun with weapons, the capital city without electricity or running water, and the presence of some 15,000 United Nations peacekeepers, one of the most expensive peacekeeping efforts in U.N. history.

The fourth poorest nation in the world, Liberia suffers unemployment estimated to be as high as 85 percent, with 90 percent of the population earning less than $410 a year.

The population of Monrovia doubled to an estimated 1.5 million as a result of the civil war, with most of the residents crowded into shantytown slums lacking sanitation, such as West Point, Buzzi Quarter, Clara Town and Sawmill. About two-thirds of the population lacks access to clean toilets, with cholera rampant and the two leading child killers listed as malaria and diarrhea.

Source: WND

Suspected Ebola patient hospitalized in Sweden

A patient suspected to have Ebola has been hospitalized in the Swedish capital of Stockholm, Reuters reported, citing local media sources.

It is reported, that a man has recently returned from a country that is included in the “risk zone,” one of the countries with previously reported cases of fatal disease.

The patient was taken to Karolinska University Hospital, where doctors put him in a detention center to run the necessary tests.

The Ebola virus has claimed 1,552 lives from 3,069 cases since December, according to the World Health Organization.

The worst Ebola epidemic in history and the first to have occurred in West Africa began in southern Guinea and soon spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria.

A separate outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed 13 people.

The WHO says it could infect some 20,000 people before it is brought under control.

Historically, the disease has a mortality rate of about 90 percent, although the current outbreak has so far recorded fewer deaths per infection. Ebola is transmitted through direct contact with the blood or bodily fluids of the infected.

WHO pandemic business plan states goal is to vaccinate world’s population

A WHO business plan to increase the supply of pandemic vaccines says the goal is to produce enough pandemic vaccine to inject 6.7 billion people – or the world’s entire population.

The WHO documents says the capacity to produce pandemic vaccines with adjuvants would reach 6.2 billion doses in 2010.

“This business plan evaluates the short to medium-term (2007–2017) options available to pursue the Global pandemic influenza action plan to increase vaccine supply (GAP) goal of developing enough pandemic vaccine to immunize the world’s population (6.7 billion people).”

Meanwhile a video showing the bodies of ebola victims dumped in the source of a river by the Liberian government, currently partnering with WHO, has fueled fears that Ebola is being spread through rivers.

Locals describe how the wetlands where the bodies of at least 45 ebola victims were dumped is the source of a major river located northwest of a city. Householders close by express fears that their well could be contaminated with Ebola.

The government of Sierra Leone said in a press release on August 6th, that it had overturned a WHO plan to build Ebola treatment centers in built up areas. Treatment centers are to be relocated to communities away from where people dwell or reside,” says the press release. An Ebola center already under construction is to be moved.

Troops deployed to fight Ebola

Hundreds of troops were deployed in Sierra Leone and Liberia yesterday under an emergency plan to fight the worst-ever outbreak of the Ebola virus, which has killed more than 826 people in West Africa.

Panic among communities, which have attacked health workers and threatened to burn down isolation wards, prompted regional governments to impose tough measures last week, including closing schools and quarantining the remote forest region worst affected by the disease.

The haemorrhagic virus, which has no known cure, has infected more than 1400 people, straining the capacity of underfunded health systems and aid groups in one of the poorest regions in the world.

Despite pleas for help from aid groups, the number of cases is also creeping steadily higher in Guinea, where the outbreak originated in February. And Nigeria’s megacity Lagos recorded its second case yesterday, in a doctor who treated US victim Patrick Sawyer.

Convoys of military trucks ferried troops and medical workers to Sierra Leone’s far east, where the density of cases is highest. Military spokesman Colonel Michael Samoura said the operation, codenamed Octopus, involved about 750 military personnel.

Isolated communities will be quarantined but healthcare workers will have freedom of movement to keep the communities supplied with food.

In neighbouring Liberia, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and ministers held a crisis meeting on Sunday to put in place a series of anti-Ebola measures as police contained infected communities in the north of the country.

“The situation will probably get worse before it gets better,” Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown said.

“We are overstretched. We need support; we need resources; we need workers.”

The World Health Organisation plans to launch a $100-million response plan.

WHO CEO Margaret Chan warned regional leaders that Ebola was outpacing their efforts to fight it and warned of “catastrophic” consequences if the situation deteriorated.

Source: Reuters

US doctor tests positive for Ebola

Africa’s deadliest ever Ebola epidemic in West Africa has officially claimed well over 600 lives, and unofficially many more.

Following the death of a Liberian government worker two days ago who collapsed in the international airport of Nigeria’s 20-million megacity, Lagos announced a “red alert” with Nigeria clamping down into a quasi-quarantine state, sending specialists to airports and seaports for containment.

In Sierra Leone, where many have more faith in traditional medicine, this has culminated in crowds gathered outside clinics and hospitals to protest against what they see as a conspiracy, in some cases clashing with police as they threatened to burn down the buildings and remove the patients.

One of Liberia’s most high-profile doctors has died of Ebola, officials said Sunday, and an American physician was being treated for the deadly virus, highlighting the risks facing health workers trying to combat an outbreak that has killed more than 670 people in West Africa — the largest ever recorded.

A second American, a missionary working in the Liberian capital, was also taken ill and was being treated in isolation there, said the pastor of a North Carolina church that sponsored her work.

Dr. Samuel Brisbane, a top Liberian health official, was treating Ebola patients at the country’s largest hospital, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Medical Center in Monrovia, when he fell ill. He died on Saturday. A Ugandan doctor died earlier this month.

The American physician, 33-year-old Dr. Kent Brantly, was in Liberia helping to respond to the outbreak that has killed 129 people nationwide when he fell ill, according to the North Carolina-based medical charity, Samaritan’s Purse.

He was receiving intensive medical care in a Monrovia hospital and was in stable condition, according to a spokeswoman for the aid group, Melissa Strickland.

The American missionary, Nancy Writebol, was gravely ill and in isolation in Monrovia.

Samaritan’s Purse spokeswoman Melissa Strickland says Dr Brantly’s wife and children had been living with him in Africa but are currently in the US.

The epidemic has a mortality rate of between 60% and 90%.

Chief Ebola doctor contracts the virus

The head doctor fighting the deadly tropical virus Ebola in Sierra Leone has himself caught the disease, the government said.

The 39-year-old Sheik Umar Khan, hailed as a “national hero” by the health ministry, was leading the fight to control an outbreak that has killed 206 people in the West African country. Ebola kills up to 90 percent of those infected and there is no cure or vaccine.

Across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, more than 600 people have died from the illness, according to the World Health Organisation, placing great strain on the health systems of some of Africa’s poorest countries.

Khan, a Sierra Leonean virologist credited with treating more than 100 Ebola victims, has been transferred to a treatment ward run by medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, according to the statement released late on Tuesday by the president’s office.

“Health workers are prone to the disease because we are the first port of call for somebody who is sickened by disease. Even with the full protective clothing you put on, you are at risk,” Khan said earlier.

Three days ago, three nurses working in the same Ebola treatment centre alongside Khan died from the disease.

The Ebola outbreak started in Guinea’s remote southeast in February and has since spread across the region.

Source: Reuters

Ebola 2014: Outbreak tops 1000 cases

The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak in West Africa has hit a new “milestone” as the World Health Organization reports in an update today than the number of cases have exceeded 1,000. The global health agency says the current epidemic trend of EVD outbreak in Sierra Leone and Liberia remains serious, with 67 new cases and 19 deaths reported from 15 – 17 July 2014.

While no new cases were reported from Guinea, 22 new cases with 10 deaths were reported from Liberia; and in Sierra Leone, 45 new cases and 9 deaths were tallied. These numbers include laboratory-confirmed, probable, and suspect cases and deaths of EVD.

The WHO says as of 17 July 2014, the cumulative number of cases attributed to EVD in the three countries stands at 1,048, including 632 deaths. The breakdown by country is as follows:

Guinea, 410 cases (301 confirmed, 95 probable, and 14 suspected) and 310 deaths (203 confirmed, 95 probable, and 12 suspected); Liberia, 196 cases (76 confirmed, 56 probable, and 64 suspected) and 116 deaths (54 confirmed, 40 probable, and 22 suspected); and Sierra Leone, 442 cases (368 confirmed, 48 probable, and 26 suspected) and 206 deaths (165 confirmed, 35 probable, and 6 suspected).

The EVD outbreak, the largest in history, began six months ago in Guinea.

Source: theglobaldispatch.com

Ebola moves to Freetown

The worst outbreak of Ebola moved to Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown.

Sidie Yahya Tunis, director of Information, Communication and Technology at the Ministry of Health and Sanitation, said: “The Ebola disease usually spreads to other places when suspected or confirmed cases in one community move to another, they abandon treatment centers to stay with relatives or they seek treatment outside the Ebola centers.”

There have been 99 Ebola deaths in Sierra Leone out of 315 laboratory-confirmed cases, the ministry said in an e-mailed statement today. The ministry said yesterday that 92 people had died out of 305 cases. Cases of the hemorrhagic fever have killed more than 540 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia in an outbreak that according to the World Health Organization may last another three to four months.

The toll is greater than the 280 people killed in 1976, when the virus was first identified near the Ebola River in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The rapid spread of the virus is largely due to people moving across African borders as well as cultural practices that are contrary to public health guidelines, such as people touching the body of a deceased relative before the funeral.