Global Health

AFP                                                                 Jan 4, 2015

ACCRA -- Ending the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history is a difficult task, but it is "within our reach", the UN's new mission chief on the disease said, warning that the world has no choice but to beat back the infection.

"This is a global crisis. We definitely have a difficult time ahead of us, but we can achieve it," Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the new head of the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER), said on arrival in Ghana on Saturday.

"We have no plan B, we have to get rid of this virus. This is within our reach, but we should not be complacent," said Ahmed, a Mauritanian, who had arrived in Accra to officially assume duty, taking over from American Anthony Banbury...

Ahmed will be visiting Liberia and Sierra Leone this week, and Guinea shortly after, "to reinforce UNMEER's strategic priorities and see first-hand the Ebola response." the text said. He will be accompanied by UN Special Envoy on Ebola, David Nabarro, it added.
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http://news.yahoo.com/victory-against-ebola-within-reach-un-mission-chief-075544472.html;_ylt=AwrBEiEmk6lU7hgAFk3QtDMD

REUTERS  by Steve Scherer                                         Jan. 3, 2015

 ROME - Italy's only Ebola patient is fully recovered and was released from hospital on Friday more than a month after being flown to Rome from Sierra Leone where he worked as a doctor treating others stricken by the disease.

Italian Doctor Fabrizio waves as he leaves the Spallanzani hospital in Rome January 2, 2015. Fabrizio, Italy's only Ebola patient is fully recovered and was released from hospital on Friday more than a month after being flown to Rome from Sierra Leone where he worked as a doctor treating others stricken by the disease. REUTERS/Remo Casilli

The 50-year-old Sicilian man has been identified only by his first name, Fabrizio. He contracted the haemorrhagic virus while working for humanitarian group Emergency during the worst Ebola outbreak on record,,,.

BOSTON GLOBE  by Felice J. Freyer                                                               Jan. 3, 2015        
The threat of Ebola over the last several months tested the nation’s ability to cope with an unfamiliar disease, raising troubling questions about what will happen when the next dangerous new germ arrives on US shores.

A worker sanitized the apartment where Ebola patient Thomas Duncan lived before being admitted to a Dallas hospital.

After Thomas Eric Duncan was misdiagnosed in a Dallas hospital and later infected two nurses with the deadly virus, government agencies and hospitals around the nation responded quickly to prevent another such incident. But it took that calamity in October to trigger measures that, critics say, a well-prepared system would have had in place....

The United States lacks a central authority and coordination among a constellation of federal, state, and local agencies, said Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness. In the United Kingdom and Canada, he said, national health systems permit the federal government to designate Ebola hospitals and to set clear, mandatory protocols.

NEW YORK TIMES                                               Jan. 2, 2015

Celia W. Dugger, deputy science editor for health, has helped to coordinate the Times’s coverage of Ebola. She edited a feature published Tuesday on the origin of this year’s Ebola outbreak, and shares how the story came together after months of reporting.

As the Ebola epidemic gained velocity this fall, spreading fear and death across one of the world’s poorest regions, I kept coming back to the same questions: How did this one get away? How did the experts — and the media, including editors like me, for that matter — miss the signs in the spring that this time would be catastrophically different from the nearly two dozen prior outbreaks? Why did the most seasoned Ebola hands — men and women who had repeatedly risked their lives battling this lethal foe — let their guard down and scale back in May just when the virus might have been throttled?