AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING CORP.     June 10, 2015

ADELAIDE, Australia --The Ebola virus can live in eye fluid 10 weeks after it is no longer detectable in a patient's blood,

Australian research has confirmedAustralian research has confirmed.

A study undertaken by researchers from Flinders University in South Australia involved Ebola survivor Dr Ian Crozier, an infectious diseases specialist who contracted the disease while treating patients in Sierra Leone in West Africa last August.

Dr Crozier survived after getting treatment in the United States and was declared free of the virus in his blood, but two months later fluid from his eye tested positive for Ebola.

Flinders ophthalmology researcher Professor Justine Smith, who took part in the study, told 891 ABC Adelaide the discovery of Ebola virus in the clear fluid in the front of the eye, between the lens and the cornea, could have big implications for Ebola survivors and for the medical staff who treat them.

Professor Justine Smith says Ebola survivors have little risk of passing on the virus from casual contact if it lurks in their eye fluid.Courtesy: Flinders University

REUTERS                                             June 10, 2015

ACCRA - Ghana has halted a plan to test two Ebola vaccines in an eastern town after legislators backed local protests against the trials sparked by fears of contamination, officials said on Wednesday.

The country's Food and Drugs Authority said it had begun enlisting volunteers in Hohoe in the Volta region to be injected with drugs made by Johnson & Johnson and Bavarian Nordic as part of a global Ebola vaccine drive.

Youth leaders threatened to boycott the program. "We don't want to be guinea pigs," one local leader told Reuters.

The (health) minister has suspended the trials indefinitely because the people said they don't want it," Health Ministry spokesman Tony Goodman said.

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http://news.yahoo.com/ghana-halts-ebola-vaccine-trial-due-community-protests-230206801--finance.html;_ylt=AwrC1Cj8y3hVjHUAonXQtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTByOHZyb21tBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg--

NBC NEWS   by Magie Fox                          June 10, 2015

The steady decline in Ebolacases has stopped and the numbers are ticking up again in Guinea and Sierra Leone, the World Health Organization reported Wednesday.

WHO is worried that there are still people who don't understand how to stop the spread of the virus, which has infected more than 27,000 people and killed more than 11,000 of them in the West African epidemic. Even more worrying, it's not entirely clear where some of the new cases have come from....

If health workers can find out where and how people were infected, they can track down and check everyone who might have been in close contact and night transmit the disease. But there are still mysterious outbreaks.

Read complete story.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/ebola-ticks-again-west-africa-n373171

Exhaust rises from cooling towers at the new Neurath lignit coal-fired power station at Grevenbroich near Aachen, western Germany. Photograph: Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty Images

CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - Let Them Eat Coal: Why the G7 must stop burning coal to tackle climate change and fight hunger

theguardian.com - by John Vidal - June 8, 2015

Five of the world’s seven richest countries have increased their coal use in the last five years despite demanding that poor countries slash their carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change, new research shows.

Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and France together burned 16% more coal in 2013 than 2009 and are planning to further increase construction of coal-fired power stations. Only the US and Canada of the G7 countries meeting on Monday in Berlin have reduced coal consumption since the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009.

The US has reduced its coal consumption by 8% largely because of fracking for shale gas.

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Commentary on U.S. legal and policy issues raised by the Ebola outbreak

WASHINGTON LAWYER by Sarah Kellog       April, 2015 edition

...Despite knowing that Ebola would likely find its way here (to the U.S.), the public health system was ill-prepared to fight the disease. It was caught napping, unable to swiftly formulate an effective national plan to contain the virus, address the concerns of medical professionals, and calm the public’s mushrooming fears....

The same lack of preparation seemed evident in how government authorities responded and applied public health statutes and regulations, especially at the state and local levels. Legal experts say U.S. public health law is robust enough to address any disease crisis, even one as deadly as Ebola, but the people who administer the law showed a profound ignorance about disease prevention and mitigation, as well as of basic civil rights, in dealing with the Ebola threat.

“Legally, we’re in excellent shape,” says James Hodge, a professor of public health law and ethics at Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and a national expert on infectious diseases and the law. “Politically, we’re severely challenged.”

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AFP                                                                                                June 10, 2015

Rome -- An Italian nurse who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone with medical charity Emergency has been cured and left hospital on Wednesday, the health ministry announced.

Stefano Marongiu, a male nurse from Sardinia, has spent the last month receiving treatment at the Spallanzani infectious diseases clinic in Rome.

He was the second Italian to contract the disease after Fabrizio Pulvirenti, a Sicilian doctor who had also worked for Emergency in Sierra Leone.

The doctor, who left hospital in January, was treated at the same clinic with a combination of experimental drugs and the blood plasma of an Ebola survivor.

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http://news.yahoo.com/italian-nurse-cured-ebola-130902382.html

submitted by Sarah Slaughter         

At The Epidemic’s Epicenter: A Liberian child sits in an Ebola isolation ward housing people who might have contracted the contagious disease.  Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Did real-time epidemic modeling save lives in West Africa?

spectrum.ieee.org - by David Brown - May 28, 2015

. . . “agent-based” models will give a more nuanced picture of how pathogens affect and sicken a population. “This is the wave of the future,” says Stephen Eubank, deputy director of the Virginia Tech lab. “It’s going to take a concerted effort to gather the data and the expertise. But it’s going to happen.”

And so, too, will another Ebola outbreak.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

BBC by Anne Soy                                                              June 9, 2015
The UN's emergency Ebola response headquarters in Ghana's capital, Accra, is to close as the outbreak slows.

The head of the mission, Peter Graaff, met the Ghanaian president to thank the country for hosting the agency since it was set up in September last year.

A small team will stay until the end of June to co-ordinate air operations, the agency, known as Unmeer, said.

Ghana has not been affected by the epidemic in West Africa, which has killed more than 11,000 people.

The BBC's Africa health correspondent Anne Soy says the mission set up its headquarters in Accra as it was far enough away from the affected countries, where there was logistical lockdown, but close enough the epicentre of the outbreak.
Read complete story.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-33063900

NIH Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)                            June 9, 2015

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Photo: Denis Van Tine/AP Photo

The musician is giving back to people in a major way.

theroot.com - by Yesha Callahan - June 2, 2015

When he’s not singing or producing music, Akon is busy providing sustainable living options to people in African countries. The Senegalese-American singer’s initiative, appropriately called Akon Lighting Africa, aims to supply electricity to 600 million people in Africa who lack it with the launch of the Solar Academy.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

(ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE)

CLICK HERE - Akon Lighting Africa

Controversy over Vaccine trials in Ghana

GHANAWEB.COM                                                June 9, 2015

Leading pharmaceutical companies including Johnson & Johnson, Bavarian Nordic, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) are the companies behind the impending Ebola vaccine trial in Ghana....

Ghana's Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) on Monday confirmed that vaccines for Ebola would be tested in Ghana, but dismissed reports that the trial will harm persons who will be used as ‘guinea pigs’ for the exercise....

StarrFMonline.com sources revealed that the Hohoe Midwifery Training School has been selected for the project. As part of an enticement package, students who volunteer for the trial will be given Ghc200 and a cell phone as reward.

Several civil society organisations including the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, Coalition for Ghana’s Independence Now (CGIN) and the Volta regional branch of the ruling NDC have all kicked against the exercise and called on government to stop the trial immediately.
Read complete story.

http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=361643

REUTERS                                                      June 8, 2015

KRUEN, Germany - Leaders of the Group of Seven industrial nations pledged on Monday to wipe out Ebola but offered little in terms of concrete action, disappointing non-governmental organisations.

G7 leaders said in a communique at the end of a two-day summit in the Bavarian Alps that they would offer help to at least 60 nations, including in West Africa, over the next five years to help prevent outbreaks from turning into epidemics.

More than 11,000 people have died in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa since the first reported case in March 2014. The G7 said the crisis showed it was necessary to enhance the world's ability to prevent, detect and respond to such emergencies.

The G7 nations said they would work together to combat future epidemics and boost or establish strategies to quickly deploy teams of experts with a variety of skills via a common platform, but their communique was thin on detail.

Florian Westphal, General Director of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Germany, said the leaders had done little to ensure epidemics would not spiral out of control in future....

Red complete story.

CDC,  by John Drake and others Volume 21, Number 8—August 2015

 To guide the collection of data under emergent epidemic conditions, we reviewed compartmental models of historical Ebola outbreaks to determine their implications and limitations. We identified future modeling directions and propose that the minimal epidemiologic dataset for Ebola model construction comprises duration of incubation period and symptomatic period, distribution of secondary cases by infection setting, and compliance with intervention recommendations....

SINGULARITY HUB   by Nathan and Elie Calhoun                                                   June , 2015

....the promise of mobile technology is that we can connect the farthest, most remote corners of the globe to the Internet—where a treasure trove of information and applications can be had nearly for free.

 For aid workers, this technology is proving a powerful, even revolutionary tool.

We hope our new community mental health app will demonstrate a new depth of potential impact.

When we started designing our psychosocial services app for Liberian communities recently ravaged by Ebola, we thought we’d first need to justify the very idea of focusing on mental health in a country facing so many pressing concerns.

The health system in Liberia confronts massive challenges. When hospitals are non-existent or seriously under-staffed, when malaria is endemic and young mothers die during childbirth—it can be tempting to ask people suffering from trauma to simply “toughen up.”

AFP                                                       June 7, 2015

Conakry, Guinea --The only possible place to encounter Ebola in Conakry is the main treatment unit, yet elsewhere in Guinea the virus is thriving in a febrile atmosphere of deep mistrust and swirling conspiracy theory....

It is in Guinea — the original epicentre but least-affected country — where the reaction to the fight against Ebola has been the most suspicious, however, manifesting itself in sporadic bloodshed.

Eight members of an outreach team in the southeastern town of Womey were killed by protesters who denied the existence of Ebola and denounced a “white conspiracy” in September last year.

Violence erupted last week in the country’s western provinces, where there are around 20 confirmed cases, with attacks targeting public institutions, ambulances and even health workers.

These examples of the “reluctance” of locals, to employ the official parlance, are igniting new transmission chains and so hampering efforts to stamp out the virus, say the authorities.

Read complete story.

http://gulfnews.com/news/africa/ebola-spreads-suspicion-and-rumours-in-guinea-1.1531265