Outbreak may be worse than thought as aid workers blocked from some areas and families hide the infected.
"As Ebola has no cure, some believe infected loved ones will be more comfortable dying at home," the WHO said in a statement detailing why the outbreak had been underestimated.
"Others deny that a patient has Ebola and believe that care in an isolation ward - viewed as an incubator of the disease - will lead to infection and certain death."
...."We think six to nine months is a reasonable estimate," Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's Assistant Director-General for Health Security, said during a visit to Liberia, speaking of the time the agency now believes will be required to halt the epidemic.
An Ebola outbreak will be declared over in a country if two incubation periods, or 42 days in total, have passed without any confirmed case, a WHO spokesperson said...
Partners In Health Co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer appeared on PRI’s The World Thursday to discuss the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Nearly 2,000 cases of Ebola have been detected across Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, and the outbreak has been linked to more than 1,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization.
Farmer shared an anecdote about returning to Kigali, Rwanda, last month after attending a surgical conference in Sierra Leone. At the airport in Kigali, Farmer had his temperature taken soon after getting off the plane, a positive sign that systems for disease surveillance are functioning well in the region....
Sierra Leone has threatened to review its relationship with Kenya and several other African countries over isolation following the Ebola outbreak.
Presidential Adviser Ibrahim Ben Kargbo said the country is angered by countries like Kenya, South Africa and Senegal whose actions suggest countries affected by Ebola were "pariah states".
Miners in West Africa, home to significant reserves of iron ore, gold, bauxite, oil and gas, and other minerals, are increasing efforts to keep Ebola at bay ...Companies fear a prolonged disruption of essential supplies and restricted access from employees to remote mining camps will hurt mineral production in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Or worse: that lethal virus will infect their workers and families....While none of the firms mining, drilling and exploring in the region have reported any cases, several have announced preventative measures. These include reducing access to their sites, monitoring workers and halting non-essential work.
Perspective from The New England Journal of Medicine — Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa — No Early End to the Outbreak
Margaret Chan, M.D.
August 20, 2014DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1409859
Many people have asked me why the outbreak of Ebola virus disease in West Africa is so large, so severe, and so difficult to contain. These questions can be answered with a single word: poverty....
En Sierra Leone, la radio est une arme de guerre contre l'épidémie du virus Ebola, dans un pays où la majorité des six millions d'habitants ne sait pas lire et où il n'existe qu'une seule...
Regional humanitarian hub Senegal said on Friday it had blocked a regional UN aid plane from landing and was banning all further flights to and from countries affected by Ebola, potentially hampering the emergency response to the epidemic.
A number of aid agencies have their regional headquarters in politically stable Senegal. Both medical charity MSF and the United Nations, which are leading efforts to contain a West African Ebola epidemic that has killed at least 1 350 people, had planned to operate regional flights from the country.
...A source at the World Food Programme, which operates the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service flights, confirmed that its flights would be suspended until further notice. The daily regional service began on 16 Aug and three flights were due to leave from Dakar this week, a provisional schedule showed...
“Despite an assurance by the ministry of health that stringent measures are in place to ensure Ebola does not spread into the country through the borders, a spot check by our crew reveals otherwise....”
Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone increasingly isolated, despite WHO advising against imposing travel restrictions
...In a situation assessment issued on Friday, WHO said this had “never before been seen in an Ebola outbreak”, and said that it suggested “an invisible caseload of patients” was going undetected by the government.
Air Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria’s Arik Air, Togo’s ASKY Airlines, British Airways, Emirates Airlines and Kenya Airways have together cancelled a combined 76 scheduled flights to Guinea, 70 to Liberia and 70 to Sierra Leone.
Kenya Airways on Tuesday became the latest airline to freeze routes to Liberia and Sierra Leone after Kenya’s ministry of health recommended a temporary ban, calling the Ebola outbreak “vastly underestimated” and saying it was “expected to continue for some time”.
With fears growing that quarantining the affected countries will damage their economies and increase food shortages, WHO has urged airlines to keep routes to west Africa operational, saying it ”does not recommend any ban on international travel or trade”...
Trucks with food supplies have been dispatched to the ocean-front Liberian neighbourhood of West Point. This follows clashes with police, as residents there ...
"C'est notre dernier espoir": la Sierra Leone, isolée du monde par le virus Ebola, espèr qu'Air France et Brussels Airlines poursuivent leur desserte de Freetown, suspendue par les autres compagnies aériennes. Avant d'embarquer, les passagers sont soumis à des mesures sanitaires drastiques. Un expatrié français raconte à l'aéroport son quotidien en Sierra Leone.
The Ebola virus has killed more than 1,300 people in West Africa, but the indirect deaths caused by this epidemic are likely to be far worse. Right now, it's the rainy season. And that means it's high season for malaria.
"Probably 85 percent of the fevers right now are malaria," says Laura Miller, health coordinator in Sierra Leone for the International Rescue Committee. "But more of those cases will go untreated than usual."
The Department of Foreign Affairs on Sunday said it is preparing for the evacuation of overseas Filipino workers in three countries in West Africa due to the Ebola virus that has claimed hundreds of lives there. To be evacuated are 880 Filipinos in Guinea; 632 in Liberia, including 148 peacekeepers; and 1,979 in Sierra Leone, Foreign Affairs spokesman Charles Jose also said.
Partners in Health co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer discusses what can be done to stop the epidemic and the need to build local healthcare capacity, not just an emergency response.
.Uganda is "really a model of what we want to see happen all over in ..low- and even middle-income countries in terms of better detection, response and prevention," said Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has set up a high-security laboratory and helped fund other health system upgrades in the country as part of a U.S. government global health security initiative.
By contrast, Ebola-stricken countries such as Sierra Leone and Liberia are unraveling. Hospitals, schools and businesses have closed. In Liberia, doctors have gone on strike for want of protective clothing and gloves. In one Liberian neighborhood, residents looted a transit center for suspected Ebola patients....
West Australian mining companies with operations in West Africa are preparing their workforce as the threat of the Ebola virus escalates.
We are doing programs in communities that surround our mine site, so they are aware of the threat and how to reduce the potential of it affecting their community.
"We are also monitoring people coming and going from our site, particularly if they are travelling to Guinea."
WA-based miner Tawana Resources, which is developing an iron ore project in Liberia, said it was halting all non-essential work in the region to protect its employees from infection.
In a statement to the Australian Stock Exchange, the company said all non-essential local staff, contractors and expatriate staff would be returning to their homes....
She said Western nations must dispatch more experts in tropical medicine, especially field workers who know how to help communities prevent the often lethal virus from spreading.
And the World Health Organization (WHO) must fulfill its leading role in coordinating the international response to the epidemic, the president of the global, Swiss-based medical charity told Reuters by telephone.
"I think they are in the process of bringing more people from the WHO but the reality is that this epidemic will be not be contained unless there are more players," Liu said.
"We are missing everything right now. We are missing a strong leadership centrally, with core nation capacity and disease emergency management skills. It's not happening."
Ivory Coast has closed its land borders with Ebola-affected West African neighbours Guinea and Liberia in an attempt to prevent the world's deadliest outbreak of the virus from spreading onto its territory, the government announced.
...“This phenomenon strongly suggests the existence of an invisible caseload of patients who are not being detected by the surveillance system,” the agency said. This has “never before been seen in an Ebola outbreak.”...
“In light of the outbreak of the deadly Ebola hemorrhagic fever in neighboring Uganda, the (...) (Rwanda steps up efforts to prevent the spread of Ebola from neighbouring country http://t.co/RNjiFwWinB...”;
Well Kenya has been classified a high-risk country by The World Health Organization. It's on high alert to prevent the spread of Ebola. And now Jomo Kenyatta...
While Western NGOs have been evacuating Ebola-affected countries in West Africa in droves, Chinese medical teams and businesses, including software maker Huawei, have been very public about staying put. “Chinese companies that have projects in West Africa are not scared away by the Ebola outbreak but hold on to their commitment and win-win cooperation with African countries,” a news story by state-run Xinhua stated earlier this week.
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The outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has given Beijing an opportunity to prove its commitment in Africa and to turn around what some see as China’s mercantilist behavior on the continent, and Beijing has sent medical supplies, experts, and money.
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But behind the scenes, Chinese businesspeople appear to be growing more skittish about continuing projects on the continent, where countries like Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia have emerged as top Chinese investment destinations.
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