NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO by Jason Beaubein                                              May 9, 2015

MONROVIA -They were the ones who went door to door to stop the spread of Ebola. They were accused of passing on the virus and had water hurled at them. They were the community health workers — the unsung heroes of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia.

NEW YORK TIMES  by Normitsu Onishia                                                             May 9, 2015          

...“I am thrilled by the significant progress made by the people of Liberia,” said Tolbert Nyenswah, a deputy health minister. But, he warned, “we still need to keep up vigilance.”

The weak health systems in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three nations hit hardest by the disease, did more than just crumple in the face of Ebola’s onslaught last year. They played a central role in spreading the disease.

Clinics routinely misdiagnosed the disease and discharged Ebola patients with pills for common illnesses. Infected health care workers passed the virus to their colleagues, families and communities.

Local and international health officials are now focusing on extinguishing the waning Ebola epidemic in Guinea and Sierra Leone. But they have a bigger goal as well: shoring up beleaguered health systems that were inadequate long before Ebola struck.

iberia is the first of the three main countries affected by Ebola to be free of the disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today (9 May), marking the end of the 15-month-long epidemic in the country. But the epidemic continues in nearby Sierra Leone and Guinea, and the WHO is warning against complacency, highlighting the risk of further flare ups and geographical spread.

msh.org - globalhealth.org                        (CLICK HERE - EVENT RSVP)

This panel discussion will focus on how key local stakeholders are working to build systems capable of addressing long-term global health issues like NCDs while maintaining resilience to outbreaks like Ebola. In light of the need to develop domestic financing mechanisms to pay for long term health solutions, stakeholders are moving beyond public-private partnerships to a model of country stakeholder engagement that includes and leverages the strengths of all actors. 

Speakers:

(originally posted November 10, 2012)

A hexayurt is a shelter designed for people with a small housing budget.

The Hexayurt can be made from about $300 of materials from Home Depot, plus about $100-150 of mail-ordered tape. Depending on the construction technique, it takes 4-8 hours to prepare at home and 1-4 hours of assembly at your destination.

Here are the specifics on the 8 ft. version (aka H12) . . .

http://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt_playa_checklist

From the 8' Hexayurt instructions, you can probably learn to make any other hexayurt design.  Here is a photo of  the 12 ft. version (aka H18) . . .

http://www.flickr.com/photos/agb/241075522/in/photostream/

Here is additional information on the Hexayurt shelter . . .

http://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt_playa

Red Cross voluntaries hand out tarpaulins and put up tents in the village of Khalckok in Nepal. Palani Mohan/IFRC

ifrc.org - by Patrick Fuller
May 6, 2015

To the casual observer, the busy highway between Kathmandu and the town of Kavere, gives a misleading impression of the extent of the destruction caused by the 25 April earthquake. Life goes on as normal and homes and shops are untouched. It’s not until you turn off the road at the town of Sangha and travel three kilometres up a bumpy dirt track into the surrounding hills, that the true picture of this disaster unfolds.

A team of young Nepal Red Cross Society volunteers is delivering tents and tarpaulins to households in the remote village of Khalchok, perched high on a ridge traversing a series of hill-tops. 115 of the 135 homes in the community are either totally destroyed or uninhabitable. The higher you travel, the worse the damage becomes. When the track ends,  the volunteers disembark from the 4-wheeled drive vehicle and start to carry the first of the family tents on a half hour trek up a narrow path to what remains of the home of Subash Lama.

MEDICAL NEWS by Sally Robertson                                                 May 8, 2015

Unprecedented in both its impact and scale, the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa has led to a renewed interest in the issue of global health security. How is global health security defined? What qualifies as a global health concern? What are the implications for governmental policies and programmes?

To address some of these questions, The Lancet invited a number of respected global health practitioners to reflect on the wider lessons that can be learned from the crisis and make suggestions about steps that can be taken to counteract such threats in the future.

Through a series of essays, the review discusses whether the outbreak is likely to improve the governance of global health security and reflects on the relevance of several issues, from the use of counterfeit medicines through to the importance of securing people’s access to healthcare.

Read complete story.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20150508/Will-the-Ebola-crisis-lead-to-improved-global-health-security.aspx

THE LANCET

ASSOCIATED PRESS by MARILYNN MARCHIONE AP Chief Medical Writer                                      May 7. 2015

(Scroll down for full study and American Academy of Ophtalolgy statement.)

For the first time, Ebola has been discovered inside the eyes of a patient months after the virus was gone from his blood.

Ebola has infected more than 26,000 people since December 2013 in West Africa. Some survivors have reported eye problems but how often they occur isn't known. The virus also is thought to be able to persist in semen for several months.

The new report concerns Dr. Ian Crozier, a 43-year-old American physician diagnosed with Ebola in September while working with the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone.

He was treated at Emory University Hospital's special Ebola unit in Atlanta and released in October when Ebola was no longer detected in his blood. Two months later, he developed an inflammation and very high blood pressure in one eye, which causes swelling and potentially serious vision problems.

Read complete story.

SHELTERBOXUSA                                                             April 28, 2015
(Scroll down for related story)

Kathmandu, Nepal ---A ShelterBox response team is in Nepal to see how ShelterBox can be of assistance following an earthquake measuring 7.8 in magnitude....

... ShelterBox already has aid, including tents, prepositioned in the country, which could be used as emergency clinics, as well as shelters in the immediate aftermath.
Read complete report.
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1237220?ref=feeds%2Flatest

ROTARY NEWS                                                                     April 27, 2015
"Rotarians worldwide stand together in expressing a profound sadness at the devastation resulting from this weekend's deadly earthquake in Nepal," says RI President Gary C.K. Huang. "As we mourn the thousands of lives lost, Rotary joins other international agencies in providing immediate relief to survivors and mobilizing our expertise to support long-term recovery and rebuilding efforts throughout the country."

EKANTIPUR.COM by Manish Gautam and Pranaya SJB Rana      April 20, 2015
 
Nepal -- More than two weeks later, the mystery disease in Jajarkot has finally been identified as swine flu. With 24 people dead and thousands infected in a number of remote VDCs in Jajarkot, the disease has made national headlines. Yet, many have criticised the government for its lackluster response to the outbreak.

A team led by Health Minister Khaganath Adhikari visited the outbreak sites only after a dozen people had died. The team returned with inadequate samples for testing, prolonging the diagnosis period. Since then, a medical team of roughly 40 medical personnel from the Epidemiology and Disease Control Division (EDCD), the World Health Organisation, and the Nepal Army have been deployed to the outbreak sites.

Yet, there is little sign of the disease abating. Manish Gautam and Pranaya SJB Rana spoke to Dr Baburam Marasini , the harried director of the EDCD, on the state’s response to the outbreak, the EDCD’s complaints of a lack of funding, and the state’s preparedness for such epidemics.

Read full story.

PR NEWSWIRE                                                                                                  May 7, 2015

(Scroll down for interview with Bill Gates)

At its Global Partners Forum, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will announce the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance Network (CHAMPS), a network of disease surveillance sites in developing countries. These sites will help gather better data, faster, about how, where and why children are getting sick and dying. This data will help the global health community get the right interventions to the right children in the right place to save lives. The network will also be invaluable in providing capacity and training in the event of an epidemic, such as Ebola or SARS. The Gates Foundation plans an initial commitment of up to $75 million on the effort.

NEW SCIENTIST  Opinion                                   May 6, 2015

...HOW the world has changed. In 1948, the first commercial jet airliner was still a few years away from take-off, and the global population was just over 2 billion. Less than one-third lived in cities. Back then, safeguarding global health seemed an eminently manageable project. The newly formed United Nations agreed, and established the World Health Organization.

 Now, over half the planet's 7 billion people are packed into urban areas. Between us, we travel tens of billions of kilometres around the globe every year, with plenty of pathogens and parasites coming along for the ride. The WHO, largely unchanged since its creation, is ill-equipped to deal with the disease threats that this new world creates.

The recent Ebola outbreak is a case in point. Even the WHO's director-general, Margaret Chan, said her organisation was "overwhelmed" and admitted that a crisis on that scale "cannot be solved by a single agency".

DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS                             May 6, 2015

Image: Kathmandu Living Labs' earthquake site collects data about conditions and needs. Each blue dot represents the number of reports of help wanted — medical, food, water or shelter — near Kathmandu. Kathmandu Living Labs

npr.org - May 5th 2015 - David Lagesse

These pleas for help in the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake have popped up on ever changing maps of the disaster zone, compiled and posted by hundreds of digital volunteers around the globe. They've not been to Nepal and very likely haven't met each other, instead working together through online forums and chat rooms and posting their work to Web documents and maps.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

ALL AFRICA  THE NEW REPUBLIC Liberia by Reuben Sei Waylaun May 6, 2015
MONROVIA -- A study conducted by the Social Mobilization and Behavior Change Communication at the Ministry of Health in collaboration with UNICEF has shown that radio played significant roles in the fight against the deadly Ebola virus in the country.

The head of the Social Mobilization and Behavior Change Communication, Rev. John Sumo said radio played a critical role in the awareness figuring to 93% out of the study conducted on 1100 households in the five worst hit counties in December 2014.

He said, "during the study, 93% of the respondents said they first learnt about Ebola from the radio. They acknowledged that radio messages were complimented in collaboration with information from their closest neighbors and the print media...."

Read complete story.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201505060574.html