Fresh Graves Point to Undercount of Ebola Toll

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Zimbabwe: Reportedly 98 Persons Under Ebola Quarantine

NEWS24    September 23, 2014

Cape Town – At least 98 people reportedly have been placed under Ebola quarantine in Harare, as Zimbabwe takes steps to strictly monitor visitors coming into the country.

This comes as fears continue to grow that the deadly Ebola virus might spread beyond West Africa where the epidemic has killed 2 800 people.

According to News Day, out of the 98 people who have been quarantined, 84 were coming from Nigeria.

Link to complete story.

http://www.news24.com/Africa/Zimbabwe/At-least-98-under-Ebola-quarantine-in-Harare-20140923

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London Group Plans to Start First Clinical Tests of Ebola Drugs in West Africa

Washington Post

by Abby Ohlheiser September 23 at 11:45 AM

London based scientists, working with international aid groups, are planning to start the first clinical trials in West Africa for drugs to treat Eboa. The trials could begin in a matter of months.

Wellcome Trust's $5 million initiative will include drugs from Mapp Biopharmaceutical, Sarepta and Tekmira, according to Reuters. Mapp makes zMapp, the experimental cocktail administered to two Americans who contracted the disease in Liberia. Tekmira recently gained the approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to use its TKM-Ebola treatment on confirmed or suspected cases of the disease.

Both drugs are still in the experimental phase; researchers have not yet determined the safety or effectiveness of the treatments.

Text of full story:

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EBOLA MAY BECOME ENDEMIC TO WEST AFRICA WITH 71 PER CENT INFECTION RATE--WHO STUDY

LOS ANGLES TIMES     September 22, 10:25 PM

by Monte Morin

In a grim assessment of the Ebola epidemic, researchers say the deadly virus threatens to become endemic to West Africa instead of eventually disappearing from humans.

"The current epidemiologic outlook is bleak," wrote a panel of more than 60 World Health Organization experts in a study published Tuesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

"We must therefore face the possibility that Ebola virus disease will become endemic among the human population of West Africa, a prospect that has never previously been contemplated."

In the absence of new control measures, the authors estimated that the total case load would exceed 20,000 by Nov 2.

Link to full story

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-ebola-may-be-endemic-in-people-20140922-story.html

Link to New England Journal of Medicine study

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1411100?query=featured_ebola

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World wakes up to Ebola as cases set to top 1 million

By Debora MacKenzie - 23 Sep 2014 - newscientist.com

This article appeared in print under the headline "World wakes up to true threat of Ebola"

Only decisive action can stop the virus becoming entrenched in Africa and spreading elsewhere, say epidemiologists.

The world has finally got serious about Ebola. In a first for a public health threat, the United Nations has launched the kind of response it normally reserves for war zones. Meanwhile, the US, UK and France are sending troops to build treatment units, train health workers and keep order.

It's not a moment too soon: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warn that without a massive effort to slow the epidemic, a million people in West Africa could have Ebola by January. Some will carry it elsewhere, and the virus may circulate non-stop in Africa for the foreseeable future.

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WHO PLAN WOULD MOVE INFECTED PERSONS FROM HOMES TO COMMUNITY CENTERS

Washington Post  September 23, 014
by Lenny Bernstein and Lena H. Sun

MONROVIA, LIBERIA  -The Liberian government, the World Health Organization and their nonprofit partners here are launching an ambitious but controversial program to move infected people out of their homes and into ad hoc centers that will provide rudimentary care, officials said Monday.

The community centers would supplement hospitals.

However Doctors Without Borders Director of operations says "this is not going to work," saying the infected countries do not have the needed infrastructure.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/new-effort-to-fight-ebola-in-liberia-would-move-infected-patients-out-of-their-homes/2014/09/22/f869dc08-4281-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html?hpid=z5

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Rockefellers, Heirs to an Oil Fortune, Will Divest Charity of Fossil Fuels

      

Stephen Heintz, left, with Valerie Rockefeller Wayne and Steven Rockefeller on Tuesday.
Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

nytimes.com - by John Schwartz - September 21, 2014

John D. Rockefeller built a vast fortune on oil. Now his heirs are abandoning fossil fuels.

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WHO SAYS EBOLA "CONTAINED" IN NIGERIA AND SENEGAL

REUTERS

An outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has been largely contained in Senegal and Nigeria, the World Health Organization said on Monday, but the disease is still spreading elsewhere and has now killed over 2,811 people in the region.

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Ban Ki-moon: 'World living in an era of unprecedented level of crises'

United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon with actor Leonardo DiCaprio during his designation ceremony as the UN Messenger of Peace. Photograph: EPA

United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon with actor Leonardo DiCaprio during his designation ceremony as the UN Messenger of Peace. Photograph: EPA

Julian Borger - New York The Guardian
21 Sep 2014 16.55 BST

More than 140 heads of state and government fly in to New York this week for the United Nations general assembly amid apprehension that international order is unraveling at an accelerating pace, while the world's leaders seem ever less willing or able to deal with the proliferating threats.

The UN's humanitarian agencies are in danger of being completely overwhelmed by the multiple crises. Ebola is spreading rapidly across West Africa, swamping rickety national health systems and a thus-far underfunded UN effort to stop its advance. The spread of Islamic State (Isis) extremists in the Middle East, feeding on the destruction of the Syrian civil war and exposing the weakness of the Iraqi state, has similarly outpaced patchy international efforts at containment.

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Get Smarter on Agriculture and Climate

David Cleary Director of Agriculture Nature ConservancyBy David Cleary - Sep 22, 2014 - environmentalleader.com

In a somber scene-setter for the upcoming climate summit in New York, the UN’s meteorological office, The World Meteorological Organization, released a report showing that world carbon emissions in 2013 reached a record high, and atmospheric carbon is increasing at the fastest rate seen in over thirty years. Some hard questions are facing the international order, which has spent much of that period in an interminable round of meetings meant to combat climate change. Against this backdrop, the pertinent question the UN report raises is: why bother? If we appear to be losing the battle, what difference does yet another meeting and round of press conferences make, other than to traffic conditions in lower Manhattan?

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BBC Update: Sierra Leone Lockdown Called a Success

BBC         22 September 2014 Last updated at 14:11 ET

A three-day curfew aimed at containing the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone has been declared a success by authorities.

They say more than a million households were surveyed and 130 new cases discovered.

Sierra Leone is one of the countries worst affected by the outbreak, with nearly 600 of the almost 2,800 total deaths recorded so far.

Some health groups have criticised the lockdown, saying it would destroy trust between patients and doctors.

Nearly all of the deaths in the world's worst Ebola outbreak have been recorded in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says the situations in Senegal and Nigeria have now been "pretty much contained".

According to the UN agency, the number of overall deaths from Ebola has risen to 2,793 and the disease remains "a public health emergency of international concern".

The deadly virus is transmitted through sweat, blood and saliva, and there is no proven cure.

A Spanish priest who contracted the virus whilst working in Sierra Leone was flown back to Spain for treatment

In other developments:

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Ebola in Africa: Chaos is contagious

Illustration: Ebola virus (Photo: Thinkstock.com)courier-journal.com/The Chigaco Tribune - Sep 22, 2014

Faced with a brutal and wily adversary, President Barack Obama on Tuesday ordered a scaled-up military assault. Not on terrorists in Syria, but Ebola in West Africa.

The president dispatched some 3,000 American troops to help build 17 treatment centers. The Pentagon will establish a military command center in Liberia to coordinate the civilian response to the epidemic. American military health experts will help train thousands of African health care workers. American aid workers will help distribute supplies and information to families there.

The U.S. — and, we hope, the rest of the world — is getting serious about confronting this plague blazing through Africa. The official Ebola toll as of late Tuesday: 4,985 cases and 2,461 deaths. Some experts, however, suspect the actual death tally is much higher. And the rate of Ebola infection is growing exponentially. The number of Ebola cases could spike to 20,000 in a matter of months.

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Searching for the answer: Can the world stop Ebola?

By Elizabeth Cohen - Sep 22, 2014 - cnn.com

Monrovia, Liberia (CNN) -- As I stood in the sweltering heat outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta earlier this week, President Barack Obama whispered in my ear.

Okay, he didn't exactly whisper, and his words were intended not just for me. In one of the most significant addresses of his presidency, Obama declared to the world that he would send 3,000 troops to Ebola-stricken West Africa.

Obama's speech was being piped into my earpiece, and I was about to go on CNN when I picked up my phone and emailed my friend Jake Tapper, the host of the show.

"World knows how to fight this disease," I wrote in the subject line, quoting the words I had just heard Obama speak.

After getting off the plane, Elizabeth Cohen has her temperature taken, since a fever is one symptom of Ebola. Her temperature was normal.

In the body of the email, I wrote to Jake, "Does it?"

And that's why I took an airplane to Liberia. I want to answer my own question.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

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Life under Ebola quarantine – in pictures

Photograph: Rein Skullerud/WFPtheguardian.com - 22 September 2014

As health authorities attempt to halt the spread of Ebola in Liberia, many citizens are struggling to feed themselves. People who have lost members of their household to the virus are often confined to their homes for weeks, making it difficult to collect food and other essentials. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is distributing food to families in quarantine in 10 counties across Liberia

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2014/sep/22/life-under-ebola-quarantine-in-pictures

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Congo's Ebola outbreak 'almost over', prime minister says

  A man washes his hands as a preventive measure against the Ebola virus on a street in Monrovia, September 13, 2014.  Credit: Reuters/James Giahyuereuters.com - Sep 22, 2014

An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Democratic Republic of Congo, unrelated to the epidemic in West Africa, is "almost over" with no new cases detected for several days, Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo said.

The government body coordinating the response to Ebola released data on Monday showing Congo had recorded 68 cases in Equateur province since August. Four previously suspected cases had tested negative, but one new case was added.

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/22/us-health-ebola-congodemocratic-idUSKCN0HH2KA20140922

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