Liberia

Introduction: The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa raised many questions about the control of infectious disease in an increasingly connected global society. Limited availability of contact information made contact tracing diffcult or impractical in combating the outbreak. 

Methods: We consider the development of multi-scale public health strategies that act on individual and community levels. We simulate policies for community-level response aimed at early screening all members of a community, as well as travel restrictions to prevent inter-community transmission. 

Non-invasive contact with Ebola survivors 6 weeks after the virus has been cleared poses little risk for healthcare workers, though contact with semen, ocular humor, and cerebrospinal fluid requires Ebola-appropriate precautions, according to a study yesterday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

A cross-sectional cohort study evaluated 555 specimens from 112 Ebola survivors without fever seeking follow-up care at a clinic in Freetown, Sierra Leone, from Apr 2 to Jun 16, 2015. Almost one third of survivors (34, or 30%) were under the age of 16, and 50 (40%) were male.

Samples were obtained from the armpit (103 specimens), blood (93), conjunctiva (92), forehead (54), mouth (105), rectum (17), semen (1), urine (69), and vagina (21). The median time from Ebola treatment unit discharge to specimen collection was 142 days.

The deadly virus is passed on through contact with body fluids and killed more than 11,000 in ravaged western Africa and the US in 2014 and 2015.

The epidemic has now been declared over but researchers have monitored 450 survivors of both sexes for a year, testing tears, saliva, faeces, vaginal fluids and semen every three months thereafter.

Anne Deborah Atai-Omoruto, who died on May 5, was a doctor instrumental in curbing the 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia.
Credit Zoom Dosso/Getty Images

submitted by Carrie La Jeunesse

nytimes.com - by CLAIR MacDOUGALL - MAY 10, 2016

Anne Deborah Atai-Omoruto, a Ugandan doctor who went to Liberia at the height of the Ebola epidemic in 2014 and helped turn the tide in the battle against the disease, died on May 5 in Kampala, Uganda. She was 59.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, her daughter Acom Victoria said.

Dr. Atai-Omoruto, at the request of the World Health Organization, arrived in Liberia in July 2014 with a team of 14 Ugandan health workers she had gathered.

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