Situation Report

Ute, a CDC laboratory specialist, works on viruses like Ebola.

cdc.gov - August 18, 2014

The Most Important Test in West Africa

When a person in West Africa suddenly has a fever, how do you know whether it’s Ebola or something else?  When an Ebola patient gets better, how do you know when that person is no longer infectious to others?

To get answers to both questions, you need a laboratory equipped with state of the art equipment. To get those urgently needed answers quickly, that lab ideally would be located close to an Ebola treatment center.

It sounds difficult to build such a safe, sophisticated lab in a major city – and seems nearly impossible in the remote parts of Africa where Ebola outbreaks occur – but CDC has done it for other outbreaks and is doing it now in West Africa.  CDC mobile labs equipped with real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) equipment already are being set up next to West African Ebola treatment centers.

And Ute, a CDC expert, heads up the teams going with them.  When she’s not traveling to remote regions of the world, she’s at CDC headquarters in Atlanta working to speed diagnosis of the world’s worst viruses.

aljazeera.com - 16 Aug 2014 18:20

Move follows appeal to make up for shortage of medical personnel due to doctors' strike over pay.

Nigeria has said it has trained 800 volunteers to battle Ebola as fears rose that the worst-ever outbreak of the deadly disease could spread across Africa's most populous nation.  Authorities in the capital Lagos last week appealed for volunteers to make up for a shortage of medical personnel because of a six-week nationwide doctors' strike over pay.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2014/08/nigeria-trains-800-volunteers-fight-ebola-2014816164320740296.html

cdc.gov - August 13, 2014

More than 50 CDC experts battling Ebola in Africa

Hundreds of public health professionals working 24/7 in support

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now has more than 50 disease detectives and other highly trained experts battling Ebola on the ground in West Africa – successfully deploying in less than two weeks the surge of help it promised within 30 days.

CDC’s Emergency Operations Center is also at its highest level of alert.  This means more than 350 CDC U.S. staff are working on logistics, communications, analytics, management, and other support functions to support the response 24/7.

“We are fulfilling our promise to the people of West Africa, Americans, and the world, that CDC would quickly ramp up its efforts to help bring the worst Ebola outbreak in history under control,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H.  “We know how to stop Ebola.  It won’t be easy or fast, but working together with our U.S. and international partners and country leadership, together we are doing it.”

Scientists rule out natural causes for rapid melting

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Attribution of global glacier mass loss to anthropogenic and natural causes

independent.co.uk - by Steve Connor - August 14, 2014

The dramatic melting of the world’s mountain glaciers – from the Alps to the Himalayas – is mostly the result of man-made global warming rather than natural variability in the climate, a study has found. . .

. . . An assessment of about 200,000 glaciers in the world, some of which have been monitored since the mid 19th century, has found that about two thirds of the current rate of glacial melting is due to human influences on the climate.

Scientists found that while much of the melting a century or more ago was most probably due to natural variability in the climate, it is now primarily caused by anthropogenic global warming resulting from industrial greenhouse gases.

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