 Your new post is loading...
|
Rescooped by
Robin Landis
from Sustain Our Earth
September 12, 2014 2:18 AM
|
The race to stamp out West Africa's Ebola epidemic is not just about saving lives. It's also about stemming an assault on society that could include food shortages and mass migration, morphing from a medical emergency into a broad humanitarian crisis.
With the World Health Organization reporting this week that the situation in Liberia is far worse than previously known, a panel at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) warned Tuesday against the epidemic's possible ancillary effects.
Via SustainOurEarth
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 11:01 AM
|
Postwar Liberia had struggled back onto its feet in the past decade, after the civil war, and was just catching its collective breath when Ebola landed. One of the lasting effects of Ebola on the country is likely to be its impact on the economy....
Farmers are too frightened to tend their fields. Customers have stopped going to restaurants, bars and other shops. So now people in Liberia's "breadbasket" region are depending on food donations....
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 6:28 AM
|
|
|
Rescooped by
Robin Landis
from Street Art Planet
September 11, 2014 3:25 AM
|
Officials are using signs, billboards, flyers and even hand-painted murals to warn people about the deadly Ebola virus disease.
Via Street I Am
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 2:52 AM
|
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced that it will commit $50 million to support the scale up of emergency efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and interrupt transmission of the virus.
The foundation will immediately release flexible funds to United Nations agencies and international organizations involved in the response to enable them and national governments to purchase badly needed supplies and scale up emergency operations in affected countries. In addition, the foundation will work with public and private sector partners to accelerate the development of therapies, vaccines, and diagnostics that could be effective in treating patients and preventing further transmission of the disease.
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 2:47 AM
|
Médecins Sans Frontières has opened two treatment centres in response to the Ebola epidemic raging in Boende health zone, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The first is a 40-bed facility in Lokolia, the epicentre of the epidemic, and the second is a 10-bed facility in Boende.
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 2:42 AM
|
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said on Tuesday she expects the Ebola crisis gripping her country to worsen in the coming weeks as health workers struggle with inadequate supplies, a lack of outside support and a population in fear.
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 2:37 AM
|
The U.S. is planning a “surge” of federal workers into West African countries hit by Ebola, and has hired the air-ambulance company that evacuated two infected U.S. citizens in July to support them. About 1,400 U.S. government employees are in the region now, and more are on the way, the State Department said in a contract document released yesterday. As workers for global aid groups have fled, “the vacuum is increasingly being filled” by U.S. aid providers, the department said.
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 2:27 AM
|
As the U.S. government and the United Nations both stepped up giving Wednesday to quell the Ebola epidemic sweeping through several West African countries, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced it will spend $50 million on the international effort seeking a vaccine and other therapies.
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 2:12 AM
|
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 10, 2014 10:23 AM
|
Liberia is facing a "serious threat" to its national existence as the deadly Ebola virus "spreads like wildfire", its defence minister says.
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 10, 2014 10:05 AM
|
THE ministers of health from the Southern African Development Community region have adopted a common position on persons and trucks or commercial vehicles travelling from Ebola-affected countries. A communiqué issued by the SADC Secretariat yesterday said an extraordinary meeting on the Ebola virus disease (EVD) was held in Zimbabwe last week.
During the meeting, the SADC ministers of health approved restrictions on the movement of people in line with the International Health Regulations (IHR) to contain the disease.
These restrictions include that people who have a history of coming into close contact with infected people and infected dead bodies or people and infected animals from Ebola should be quarantined for a period of up to 21 days.
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 10, 2014 7:01 AM
|
|
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 12, 2014 2:09 AM
|
Dr. Rick Sacra of Holden — the third American health worker to be sickened by Ebola — is being treated with transfusions from friend and Ebola survivor Dr. Kent Brantly, said doctors in Omaha yesterday....
...Blood from an Ebola survivor contains antibodies that could help an infected patient fight the disease, Smith said....
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 10:58 AM
|
To help offset disruptions in aid delivery caused by travel restrictions on Ebola-affected countries, the top United Nations relief official today approved an emergency allocation of nearly $4 million for the UN Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) to support operations in West Africa. Valerie Amos, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, allocated $3.8 million from the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) to bolster UNHAS, as reduced commercial travel in the region has hindered the urgent deployment of healthcare personnel and supplies...
...The funding will assist the World Food Programme (WFP), which runs UNHAS, to move humanitarian personnel, medical supplies and equipment, and other essential humanitarian cargo rapidly and efficiently to multiple remote locations within Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone....
|
|
Rescooped by
Robin Landis
from Amazing Science
September 11, 2014 3:28 AM
|
Case fatality rate" - or CFR - is a term that's been tossed around a lot lately in the context of the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak… But what does it really mean?
....At first glance, it might seem then that only 53% of Ebola cases have been dying during this outbreak - a good deal less than the 80% we've seen prior... But what it really means is that only 53% of Ebola cases have died as of September 8th. We have no way of knowing whether all the people who were still hospitalized as of September 8th will survive the disease. Because of this, mid-outbreak PFC - as we've defined it thus far - doesn't tell us much about the likelihood of dying....
Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 3:12 AM
|
With warnings from officials that the Ebola virus is "spreading like wildfire" in Liberia, Sarah Crowe, who works for the UN children's agency, describes her week on the Ebola front line:
Flights into disaster zones are usually full of aid workers and journalists. Not this time. The plane was one of the first in after some 10 airlines stopped flying to Liberia because of Ebola, and still it was empty....
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 2:49 AM
|
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will convene leaders gathering in New York for the upcoming high-level segment of this year’s United Nations General Assembly to highlight the urgent needs and required response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 2:44 AM
|
Guinean President Alpha Conde on Tuesday urged the media in the country to get involved in the fight against Ebola virus that has been affecting the country during the last seven months.
Never before has the world seen an Ebola outbreak like the one currently spreading across Africa. Thousands have died, even more have become infected, and with no cure and limited resources at their disposal, health officials are struggling to keep up. From Patient Zero to today, here is a look back at how the outbreak became the worst on record.
Via VERONICA LESTER
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 2:33 AM
|
In a world of limited healthcare resources, we need to make hard decisions that will deliver high-impact outcomes for the most people at the least cost. Giving the WHO an additional half-billion dollars to curb Ebola virus infections would be a poor choice.
The UN’s World Health Organization is opportunistic, exaggerating and impulsively jumping on every public health threat that makes the front page–and demanding ever more of someone else’s money. The most recent blip on WHO’s radar is the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, which has tallied about 4,000 known cases since last December. To address it, WHO wants $490 million–from governments, development banks, the private sector and in-kind contributions....
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 11, 2014 2:21 AM
|
In Summary - In Liberia, people are starving. Due to the state of emergency, the government has closed down major street markets, creating food and drug shortages.
- In the face of the current outbreak, which is anticipated to infect at least 20,000 West African lives, the response team must collaborate with tribal leaders.
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 10, 2014 1:55 PM
|
Public health officials knew Ebola was coming. They know how to defeat it. But they’re blowing it anyway....
...The neglectful status of the WHO was, horribly, by design. Its governing body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), in which nearly every nation on Earth is a voting member, has declined to increase country WHO dues for more than a quarter-century. Worse, following the 2008 financial crisis, most of the extrabudgetary special support that the WHO relied upon -- funds from rich countries that more than doubled the agency's financing -- disappeared as once-wealthy governments turned away from philanthropy while saving their fiscal skins. The WHO saw its revenues fall by more than $1 billion, and inflation-adjusted dues from member countries plummeted to pre-1990 levels. As Europe's financial crisis worsened in 2010, speculators sold their euros in favor of Swiss francs, driving the value of that currency up 32 percent. Since the WHO receives its revenues in U.S. dollars, but makes its Swiss payroll and other payments in francs, the agency was forced to lay off 20 percent of its staff. And in 2011, the WHA began pressuring the Geneva-based WHO to decrease its infectious diseases work in favor of a radical increase in attention to noncommunicable ailments such as cancer and heart disease. The coup de grâce came with the 2012 WHA meeting, in which the nations of the world voted to chop the WHO's crisis and epidemic funding by 50 percent, bottoming out this year at a mere $114 million.....
....The take-home message of the road map boils down to this: Stopping Ebola is going to require a great deal of money, thousands more skilled health workers and logistics experts, massive communications efforts, huge food and nutrition support for the people of West Africa, and "coordination, coordination, coordination."
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 10, 2014 10:13 AM
|
|
|
Scooped by
Robin Landis
September 10, 2014 10:02 AM
|
...The recent instructions that we have given to not allow anyone who has been in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone or Senegal within the last 22 days to board Rwanda-bound flights or enter the country by any means of transport, except with a special waiver, has nothing to do with nationality.
Rather, this is because anyone who has been in those countries could potentially be a carrier of Ebola to any destination, including during an asymptomatic incubation period (21 days maximum).
These instructions do not prevent nationals from returning home. Returning compatriots fall into two strict categories, which are determined by their clinical status...
|
http://tinyurl.com/phvv6zq
Valuable Info about a special Ebola-Mask distribution campaign
opportunity
www.EbolaVirusSolutions.com
#ebola #ebolaoutbreat #ebolanews #ebolasolutons