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Ebola response in Liberia is hampered by infighting

NEW YORK TIMES                                                                                                      Nov. 20, 2014
By Donald G. McNeil Jr.

The global response to the Ebola virus in Liberia is being hampered by poor coordination and serious disagreements between Liberian officials and the donors and health agencies fighting the epidemic, according to minutes of top-level meetings and interviews with participants. Medical workers handling a blood sample of an Ebola victim as the girl, 9, lay in a shawl in Monrovia, Liberia. She later died. Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

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West African Mining Projects Take Hit From Ebola Crisis

Epidemic Delays Rollout of Jobs Meant for Residents of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone

WALL STREET JOURNAL                                                                                             Nov. 19, 2014
By Patrick McGroarty in Liberia, David Gauthier-Villars in Guinea
and Alex MacDonald in London

...a promising corner of the global economic frontier is pocked with stalled mining projects. The Ebola epidemic has scared off ships and planes; prompted expatriates to abandon their posts; and delayed the rollout of thousands of jobs meant for residents of the three poor West African countries hardest hit by the virus: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

A three-story steel shiploader at ArcelorMittal’s port in the Liberian city of Buchanan is part of a $1.7 billion expansion delayed by Ebola. Patrick McGroarty/The Wall Street Journal

“All the projects are at a standstill,” said Mr. Foulah, chief executive of the mining-explosives firm ECP Guinée.

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NGOs: Ebola doctors desperately needed

WASHINGTON --The pipeline of Ebola doctors and nurses in West Africa is still running dry even as money increasingly flows into the region, leaders of the nongovernmental effort warned Tuesday.

“We face a severe shortage of adequately trained health professionals, both national and international,” Rabih Torbay, a vice president of the nonprofit International Medical Corps, told a congressional panel.

International Medical Corps has about 900 workers in Liberia and Sierra Leone, about 90 percent of whom are African nationals. But Torbay said it has been extremely difficult to recruit volunteers to help stem the outbreak.

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Benin: Authorities Rule Out the Ebola Track After a Series of Deaths

      

Rue de Cotonou au Bénin - Getty Images/Raido Valjamaa

(ENGLISH TRANSLATION PROVIDED BELOW)

Bénin: les autorités écartent la piste Ebola après une série de décès

rfi.fr/afrique - November 18, 2014

Interrogation et inquiétude au Bénin après le décès de plusieurs personnes à l’hôpital de Tanguiéta situé dans le nord-ouest du pays. Ces décès, survenus en moins d’un mois, concernent le personnel de santé. Les tests Ebola sont négatifs et la ministre de la Santé a tenu, lundi, une conférence de presse pour rassurer la population.

C’est la semaine dernière que le ministère de la Santé a été informé du décès de trois agents de l’hôpital St Jean de Dieu de Tanguiéta. Parmi eux, il y aurait deux infirmières en néonatologie. Vendredi, c’est un pédiatre qui est mort à Porto-Novo où il avait été transféré.

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Africa’s Village Healers Complicate Ebola Fight

In Sierra Leone, Traditional Treatments and Death of a Woman Who Resisted Outside Help Fostered Outbreak

WALL STREET JOURNAL                                                                                                      Nov. 18, 2014
By Peter Wonacott
KAILAHUN, Sierra Leone—When a Red Cross volunteer visited this impoverished border district in mid-May to warn about the spread of Ebola, he faced a formidable adversary: the village healer.

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Fearing Ebola surge, Mali widens virus watch to 440 people

AFP                                                                                                         Nov.17,2014                                 

Fearful of a surge of Ebola cases, Mali has placed more than 440 people under surveillance..

Officials in Mali met to consider increasing security at its border following two confirmed cases of Ebola due to infection in neighboring Guinea.

 

Police officers stand in front of the quarantined Pasteur clinic in Bamako on November 12, 2014 ©Habibou Kouyate (AFP/File)

Mali has been scrambling to prevent a minor outbreak from turning into a major crisis after the deaths of a Guinean imam and the Malian nurse who treated him in the capital Bamako.

"The number of contacts followed by health services amounts to 442. They have all been placed under observation for health control," Samba Sow, of the Ebola emergency operations center, said in a statement late Sunday.

Teams of investigators have been tracking health workers and scouring Bamako and the imam's village of Kouremale, which straddles the Mali-Guinea border, for people who could have been exposed.

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Ambassador John Hoover: Ebola a challenge for U.S. diplomatic team in Sierra Leone

WASHINGTON POST                                                                                                Nov. 17, 2014

By Joel Achenbach

John Hoover, the U.S amabassador to Sierre Leone, .... noted that the response to the epidemic in Sierra Leone poses a management challenge, and he sees a need to “sharpen coordination.”

                                                           Ambassador John Hoover. (Courtesy of State Department)

“There are a great deal of players on the ground,” Hoover said in an interview from Freetown.  “Lots of people doing lots of things. It’s a question of sharpening that coordination so that we’re not missing gaps and not overlapping and tripping over one another.”

He sees progress in that battle in the eastern part of Sierra Leone, but the epidemic is flaring in the western part of the country. Sierra Leone is the country with the highest infection rate, according to the World Health Organization’s most recent update. About 70 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have deployed to Sierra Leone to fight Ebola. The U.S. military has focused on neighboring Liberia; Britain has a leading role in Sierra Leone....

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A doctor’s mistaken Ebola test: ‘We were celebrating. . . . Then everything fell apart’

WASHINGTON POST                                                                                          Nov. 17, 2014

By Kevin Sieff

...The doctors who tended to him in Freetown appeared to be unaware that an early Ebola test — taken within the first three days of the illness — is often inconclusive. In a country where information about the disease continues to move slowly, it was another potentially tragic mistake.

In many cases, a negative test at that stage means nothing because “there aren’t enough copies of the virus in the blood for the test to pick up,” said Ermias Belay, the head of the CDC’s Ebola response team in Sierra Leone.

But M’Briwa and others treated the test as definitive, even though Salia remained feverish and weak. The first results were delivered by a team of Chinese lab technicians who had opened a nearby hospital. (The technicians declined Sunday to speak about Salia’s case.)...

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/a-doctors-mistaken-ebola-test-we-were-celebrating--then-everything-fell-apart/2014/11/16/946a84da-6dd5-11e4-a2c2-478179fd0489_story.html

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U.S. was ill-equipped to handle Ebola rescues, State Dept. contract reveals

      

For now, the world has to rely on a small, Georgia-based flight company for Ebola evacuations. (AP)

Life-saving gear needed to fly sick patients was in storage as epidemic grew

news.yahoo.com - by Jason Sickles - November 11, 2014

The air ambulance operation tasked with rescuing U.S. Ebola victims from West Africa was initially slowed by bureaucratic bungling and is now at risk of being overburdened as thousands of American troops deploy to fight the deadly disease.

Yahoo News has learned the U.S. government spent millions last decade to develop and build two of the world’s only isolation chambers for flying contagious patients — but as the epidemic raged in West Africa this summer and American aid workers there needed evacuating, the medical inventions were packed away in a small-town Georgia warehouse.

The troubling lack of preparedness by federal agencies forced the State Department to put up $4.9 million as part of a rushed contract to employ a commercial aviator to safely evacuate Ebola-infected Americans from West Africa.

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Economic consequences of Ebola The ignorance epidemic

THE ECONOMIST                                                                                                        Nov. 14, 2014

NAIROBI -- Safari tents remain zipped, hotel pools are empty, game guides idle among lions and elephants. Tour operators across Africa are reporting the biggest drop in business in living memory. A specialist travel agency, SafariBookings.com, says a survey of 500 operators in September showed a fall in bookings of between 20% and 70%. Since then the trend has accelerated, especially in Botswana, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania. Several American and European agents have stopped offering African tours for the time being.

The reason is the outbreak of the Ebola virus in west Africa, which has killed more than 5,000 people. The epidemic is taking place far from the big safari destinations in eastern and southern Africa—as far or farther than the homes of many European tourists (see map). There are more air links from west Africa to Europe than to the rest of the continent, whose airlines have in any case largely suspended flights.

Moreover Ebola is hardly the biggest killer disease in Africa (AIDS and malaria are bigger). Yet, in the mind of many visitors, all of Africa is a single country.

One despairing tour operator calls it an “epidemic of ignorance”.

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