Africa

PLOS by Arlene C. Chua,Jane Cunningham,Francis Moussy, Mark D. Perkins,and Pierre Formenty      June 11 2015

 ...Since the identification of Ebola in Guinea in March 2013, rapid deployment of international mobile laboratories through WHO networks—Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) [2] and Emerging and Dangerous Pathogens Laboratory Network (EDPLN) [3]—has been vital to outbreak control operations. Deployable laboratories from multiple international organizations have been established near Ebola treatment centers (ETC) in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone....

However, several technical and social factors conspire to delay diagnosis, starting with weak surveillance systems and slow patient access to centralized ETCs. While the mean processing time is 5 hours (time difference from when samples are received in the laboratory to when they are tested), there is a marked difference in the time from when the samples are collected from suspected patients to the time they are received by the laboratory

PUBLIC BROADCASTING CORP by Caleb Hellerman         June 11, 2015

The quest for an Ebola vaccine has been a journey filled with excruciating delays and mad dashes. The latest outbreak in West Africa caused governments and drug companies to jumpstart research that had languished back when the threat of Ebola wasn’t big enough to sustain a commercial market. (Prior to 2013, the virus had sickened fewer than 2,300 people in known history). Human safety trials of two vaccines began last summer — each being given to a small group of healthy volunteers. When no major side effects were apparent, health officials scrambled to launch larger tests in the countries that were most affected by Ebola.

A volunteer receives an Ebola vaccine in Sierra Leone. Thousands of these voluntary immunizations have been tested so far in the West African nation. Photo by Cameron Hickey.

NEW YORK TIMES   by Sheri Fink, MD                                                      June 12, 2015   

After a nurse who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone was discharged Wednesday from a Rome hospital, a doctor there described the experimental treatments the patient had received as “absolutely miraculous.”

The lab at Beijing Mabworks, which developed the experimental drug, MIL77, used to treat Ebola. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times

POLITICO by Joseph Lamin Kamara                                                               June 11, 2015

The outbreak of the Ebola virus disease has had enormous impacts on Sierra Leone’s education. Whether one views the country’s immediate pre-Ebola educational system as a failure or as a success, the outbreak has exacerbated that failure or posed a setback to the success. Nevertheless, education in the country has seen more challenges than successes.

Since late 1960s, Sierra Leone has seen several political instabilities which have eventually pretermitted much of the success the country made earlier in education. Coup d’états, scramble for diamonds and a long violent civil conflict are mostly responsible for the country’s descent from being the ‘Athens of West Africa’ to performing consistently abysmally in public examinations....

Problems relating to payment of teachers’ and lecturers’ salaries, shortage of teachers, infrastructural incapacities, among others, have also been at the heart of Sierra Leone’s educational problems.

Read complete story.
http://politicosl.com/2015/06/how-the-ebola-outbreak-has-impacted-sierra-leone%E2%80%99s-education/