Health workers in protective clothing speak with new arrivals in the outpatient waiting room of Redemption Hospital, formerly an Ebola holding centre, in Liberia.  John Moore/Getty Images

CLICK HERE - SCIENCE - REPORT - Two-pore channels control Ebola virus host cell entry and are drug targets for disease treatment

businessinsider.com.au - by Chris Pash - February 27, 2015

A chemical found in the Chinese herb known as Han Fang ji switches off the channels which the Ebola virus uses to enter and infect cells, according to research by US and German scientists.

The scientists found that using a small dose of the chemical tetrandrine, but not the herb itself, stopped the virus from replicating and protected mice from the disease without obvious side effects.

The discovery of the promising drug therapy against Ebola is announced in the journal Science.

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As the Ebola epidemic draws gradually to its close, how should the world arm itself against the risks of insurgent infections?

 THE ECONOMIST                                                                                        March 21,  2015

INFECTION CONTROL TODAY                                      March 24, 2015
The World Health Organization (WHO) is publishing a series, "Ebola Diaries," with first-person accounts of WHO staff and others deployed to the field for Ebola response since the first cases were reported in West Africa on March 23, 2014.
 
Dr. Stéphane Hugonnet, team lead for gobal capacities, alert and responses for the World Health Organization (WHO), was one of the first WHO experts sent to Guinea to investigate cases of Ebola reported in late March 2014. A medical doctor who has spent the past 20 years working for WHO, MSF and others, managing outbreaks ranging from cholera, measles and yellow fever, to Lassa, Ebola and meningitis, Hugonnet found a very different sort of outbreak when he arrived in Guinea.

"We were following this rumor of a small cluster of unexplained deaths in Guinea," he says. "Some thought it could be Lassa    phane fever, but the transmission pattern was very compatible with Ebola. When the lab results came back, we learned that there was Ebola Zaire in West Africa.            

TECH REPUBLIC  by Mary Shaklett                                                                         March 24, 2015

Big data practitioners are learning that the laboratory know-how of computer scientists and statisticians must be matched with a holistic, 360-degree vision of the problem to be solved. TheEbola crisis is a prime example....

If big data is going to help solve health issues like Ebola, it must be incorporated into analytics that consider all of the factors shaping the epidemic. These are three of the ingredients that should be factored into Ebola analytics.

1: There are political barriers that stand in the way of obtaining data from cell phone providers that could assist researchers in determining where the disease will strike next.

2: Even if disease researchers could obtain this data, there is a need to "correct" the data for what it doesn't reveal. For example, if less than 50% of a country's population has access to mobile phones and individuals are constantly moving from village to village, how will researchers be able to verify the quality of the data they're getting unless there are people "on the ground" who can verify or provide corrective factors to the data?