Guinea Resilience System

C’est la semaine dernière que le ministère de la Santé a été informé du décès de trois agents de l’hôpital St Jean de Dieu de Tanguiéta. Parmi eux, il y aurait deux infirmières en néonatologie. Vendredi, c’est un pédiatre qui est mort à Porto-Novo où il avait été transféré.

WASHINGTON POST                                                                                                Nov. 17, 2014

By Joel Achenbach

John Hoover, the U.S amabassador to Sierre Leone, .... noted that the response to the epidemic in Sierra Leone poses a management challenge, and he sees a need to “sharpen coordination.”

                                                           Ambassador John Hoover. (Courtesy of State Department)

“There are a great deal of players on the ground,” Hoover said in an interview from Freetown.  “Lots of people doing lots of things. It’s a question of sharpening that coordination so that we’re not missing gaps and not overlapping and tripping over one another.”

He sees progress in that battle in the eastern part of Sierra Leone, but the epidemic is flaring in the western part of the country. Sierra Leone is the country with the highest infection rate, according to the World Health Organization’s most recent update. About 70 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have deployed to Sierra Leone to fight Ebola. The U.S. military has focused on neighboring Liberia; Britain has a leading role in Sierra Leone....

Read complete story

LOS ANGELES TIMES                                                                                         Nov. 17, 2014
By Julie Westfall

Dr. Martin Salia, who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone and was being treated at a Nebraska hospital, has died, a hospital spokesman confirmed Monday.

Martin Salia, 44, was taken to Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha to be treated for Ebola after contracting the disease in Sierra Leone. (UBCentral.org)

"It is with an extremely heavy heart that we share this news," Dr. Phil Smith, medical director of the biocontainment unit at Omaha's Nebraska Medical Center, said in a statement. "Dr. Salia was extremely critical when he arrived here, and unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we weren't able to save him."

Salia was a member of the Church of the United Bretheren in Christ and was working as a surgeon at Kissy United Methodist Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, treating Ebola patients as the disease spread in West Africa.

For now, the world has to rely on a small, Georgia-based flight company for Ebola evacuations. (AP)

Life-saving gear needed to fly sick patients was in storage as epidemic grew

news.yahoo.com - by Jason Sickles - November 11, 2014

The air ambulance operation tasked with rescuing U.S. Ebola victims from West Africa was initially slowed by bureaucratic bungling and is now at risk of being overburdened as thousands of American troops deploy to fight the deadly disease.

Yahoo News has learned the U.S. government spent millions last decade to develop and build two of the world’s only isolation chambers for flying contagious patients — but as the epidemic raged in West Africa this summer and American aid workers there needed evacuating, the medical inventions were packed away in a small-town Georgia warehouse.

The troubling lack of preparedness by federal agencies forced the State Department to put up $4.9 million as part of a rushed contract to employ a commercial aviator to safely evacuate Ebola-infected Americans from West Africa.