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Can Social Media Help Contain Ebola?

By Simon Engler - SEP 4, 2014 - 05:06 PM

Patrick Sawyer, Nigeria's first Ebola patient, collapsed at the international airport in Lagos on July 20. This Wednesday, more than six weeks later, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it was monitoring at least 200 Nigerians for infection related to Sawyer's case. Sawyer, a Liberian-American who had traveled from Monrovia, had carried the often-fatal disease to Africa's most populous country, hundreds of miles from its origin. It was as if he had slipped through a crowd.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/09/04/the_ebola_outbreak_is_out_of_control_can_it_be_tracked_remotely

 

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Ebola gene study traces origin of current outbreak

- 29 August 2014 - medicalnewstoday.com

An international research team has rapidly sequenced 99 Ebola virus genomes collected in the 2014 outbreak. The team, including members from the Broad Institute and Harvard University in the US and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation, hopes the findings will help multidisciplinary, international efforts to understand and contain the unprecedented epidemic that is growing in West Africa.

The researchers report their findings in the journal Science. Five team members died of Ebola virus disease before the manuscript was published, and their fellow authors honor their memory in the study report.

The 99 genomes came from 78 patients diagnosed with Ebola virus disease in Sierra Leone during the first 24 days of the outbreak. Some patients gave more than one sample, allowing the team to see how the virus changed over the course of a single infection.

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Boots on the Ground

Bloomberg School students assess Ebola interventions at outbreak epicenter.

When the Red Cross asked for help conducting Ebola-related research in Guinea, Bloomberg School doctoral students Tim Roberton and Clementine Fu immediately stepped forward. From July 19 to August 1, the two worked in the outbreak’s initial epicenter in Guéckédou, and in the capital city of Conakry.

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Canada offers experimental Ebola vaccine VSV-EBOV to West Africa

The Canadian Press

Aug 12, 2014 5:47 PM ET

A made-in-Canada experimental Ebola vaccine will be offered for use in the West African outbreak response, the Public Health Agency of Canada revealed Tuesday.

The news comes hours after the World Health Organization said a panel of experts advised that it would be ethical to use untested drugs and vaccines in this raging epidemic, which is several times larger than any previous outbreak.

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Disease: The Next Big One

BOZEMAN, Montana — Grim prognostications of pestilence are as old as the Book of Revelation, but they have not gone out of style or been rendered moot. Plague is a tribulation that science, technology and social engineering haven’t fixed. In the mid-1960s, some public health officials imagined that antibiotics and other modern therapies would enable us to “close the book” on infectious diseases and so make it possible to focus on noncommunicable afflictions, like heart attack, diabetes and stroke. But that optimism was mistaken...

FULL ARTICLE HERE 

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Video - TIME, GOOGLE AND NASA: Timelapse of the Earth Over the Last 30 Years

world.time.com - by Jeffrey Kluger

Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.

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NASA Reports Sunspot Six Times the Size of the Earth

February 21, 2013 - planetsave.com

Solar Flare–Producing Sunspot Forming On The Sun, NASA Images Massive Sunspot

An enormous sunspot, six times larger than the Earth is currently forming on the Sun. NASA researchers predict that the sunspot could begin triggering powerful solar flares in a couple of days.
 

 

Solar Flares: Monster Sunspot Growing Fast, NASA Warns Solar Storms Possible

February 21, 2013 - inquisitr.com

20130221-001730.jpg

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iDoctor: Could a smartphone be the future of medicine?

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news,

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The 'Chemputer' That Could Print Out Any Drug

Chemistry professor Lee Cronin with the 'chemputer' he has adapted from a 3D printer. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

When Lee Cronin learned about the concept of 3D printers, he had a brilliant idea: why not turn such a device into a universal chemistry set that could make its own drugs?

guardian.co.uk - by Tim Adams - July 21, 2012

Professor Lee Cronin is a likably impatient presence, a one-man catalyst. "I just want to get stuff done fast," he says. And: "I am a control freak in rehab." Cronin, 39, is the leader of a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University, primarily making complex molecules. But that is not the extent of his ambition.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Lee Cronin - The Cronin Group - University of Glasgow, U.K.
http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/

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Japan Questions Earthquake Forecasts

submitted by Samuel Bendett

Homeland Security News Wire - March 2, 2012

Following the massive 11 March earthquake and tsunami that rocked Japan, residents and experts there have grown increasingly skeptical of quake forecasts.

Last month two University of Tokyo seismologists released a study that predicted a major earthquake would hit Japan’s capital city within the next four years. Their study was sharply criticized by those who said their claims were likely incorrect.

Bowing to pressure, the university’s Earthquake Research Institute posted a notice on its site that stated the latest earthquake forecast was the opinion of two researchers and noted the study’s “large margin of error.”

“Many seismologists think this kind of study is too simple,” said Naoyuki Kato, a seismologist at the institute, in an interview with the Washington Post.

Japan, which has been frequently rocked by powerful earthquakes in the past, invests more money than any other nation in the world on earthquake prediction, yet despite spending more than $100 million annually, the art of predicting earthquakes remains elusive.

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