Africa Resilience Initiative

Liberia:  MSN warns that gains must not be underminded. Meanwhile U.S opens the first of its 17 treatment centers.  

(Two stories, scroll down)

 DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS                                                     Nov. 10, 2014

Monrovia – While the number of new Ebola cases reported in Liberia has declined in recent weeks, the outbreak is far from over and new hotspots continue to emerge across the country, the international medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said today, warning that the international aid response must rapidly adapt to this new phase of the epidemic, or risk undermining progress made against Ebola.

Unlike in neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone, where cases are on the rise, MSF teams in Liberia are witnessing a decline in the number of Ebola patients admitted to case management centres (CMCs) for the first time since the beginning of the Ebola epidemic.... Case numbers could again rise, as they have in Guinea, where, following two significant dips in admissions to MSF facilities, patient numbers are again increasing.

NEW ENGLAND COMPLEX SYSTEMS INSTITUTE                                                                        Oct. 27, 2014
ABSTRACT
By Kia Hall and Yaneer Bar-Yam
The number of cases of Ebola in West Africa has been growing exponentially, and projections assume that this dynamic will continue. However, recent case reports from Liberia indicate a change. The number of new confirmed cases reported by WHO has actually diminished for five weeks in a row.
The WHO report suggests that this may be due to underreporting under conditions of high levels of stress of the number of cases taking place.

Here we report that there appears to be a sound reason for the decreasing number of cases—a change in response strategy that is working. Understanding this dynamic is of critical importance for addressing the outbreak in Sierra Leone and Guinea. In particular the number of cases in Sierra Leone continues to grow exponentially.

Discussions with a WHO response coordinator in Liberia indicates that a change in strategy from individual reporting and contact tracing to community based screening for early detection and population wide behavior change happened in mid September.

HOMELAND SECURITY NEWS WIRE                                                                             Nov.6, 2014

The University of Toronto, Chematria, and IBM are combining forces in a quest to find new treatments for the Ebola virus.

Using a virtual research technology invented by Chematria, a startup housed at U of T’s Impact Center, the team will use software that learns and thinks like a human chemist to search for new medicines. Running on Canada’s most powerful supercomputer, the effort will simulate and analyze the effectiveness of millions of hypothetical drugs in just a matter of weeks.

“What we are attempting would have been considered science fiction, until now,” says Abraham Heifets, a U of T graduate and the chief executive officer of Chematria. “We are going to explore the possible effectiveness of millions of drugs, something that used to take decades of physical research and tens of millions of dollars, in mere days with our technology.”

Read complete article

Medical discussion of why some children suvive Ebola and others do not

NEW YORK TIMES                                   Nov. 10, 2014
By Sheri Fink, MD

... Over and over, doctors here have been confounded by the divergent paths of patients whose cases appeared similar at first. “No matter how long we were there, we didn’t know how to predict it,” said Dr. Steve Whiteley, a California emergency physician who volunteered.