Global

Drone footage shot by ABC cameraman Brant Cumming in the Gorkha district shows buildings reduced to rubble by the April 25 earthquake. This video highlights the remoteness of the affected areas in Nepal and the difficulties faced by rescue personnel struggling to reach them.

submitted by George Hurlburt

theconversation.com - by Gerard Fitzgerald, Apil Gurung, and Bharat Raj Poudel - May 5, 2015

The media in Nepal has been instrumental in keeping people connected and updated about the recent magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit the country on Saturday April 25.

However, initially the quake did not create a major reaction, as small scale tremors are not uncommon in the country. The Nepalese people were also unclear about the extent of the disaster as local media struggled to react to the earthquake.

The reality of the scale of the disaster began to sink in when heartbreaking pictures of the damage started emerging. Live footage and pictures from the international media gave some insight into the extent of the devastation in the earthquake ravaged nation.

CANADIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION by Moneeza Walji                                    Mayl 4, 2015
The call to action for the Ebola outbreak extended far and wide, with the epidemic now having more than 26 000 cases and claiming more than 10 000 lives, but the response has raised questions about underlying problems that hinder health care in some countries and about who was best positioned to respond.

At a recent session of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health in Boston, Dr. Peter Piot, one of the discoverers of the Ebola virus, said the outbreak and crisis in West Africa "has revealed major fault lines in the local societies and in the international system; in how we conduct research and how we develop new drugs and vaccines and also in trust and the way that international aid and development and cooperation is operating."

Set of graphs on the Ebola Outbreak

THE ECONOMIST   by the Graphics Team                                                                   May 5, 2015 

The outbreak continues to claim lives, but Liberia could be confirmed Ebola free on May 9th. The situation in Guinea and Sierra Leone is also improving with fewer provinces reporting cases than in previous weeks. The World Health Organisation reports that each country now has enough treatment beds to be able to isolate and treat patients with Ebola, and to bury everyone known to have died of the disease.

The chart above shows numbers from both the WHO's regular situation reports and from patient databases, which tend to be more accurate but are less complete for recent weeks.
See complete story and set of graphics.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/05/ebola-graphics

FOREIGN POLICY   by Freddie Wilson                                                         May 2, 2015
The country has just a handful of private helicopters, which are crucial to earthquake rescue operations. But are foreign trekkers the only ones who’ve benefitted?
In the wake of the earthquake, it became immediately clear that choppers would be crucial to lifesaving rescue operations. Landslides have besieged Nepal, wrecking many sections of its already tenuous road system. People are trapped in remote villages — or what remain of them — while supplies are bottlenecked at the Tribhuvan International Airport, in Kathmandu. “The planning over many years seems to have failed to take account of the fact that hard to reach places — most of those badly hit — would remain hard to reach, after the quake,” wrote John Bevan, who has worked with the U.N. in Nepal and Haiti, in an email from Kathmandu.