AFP                                                                                                                     Dec. 3, 2014

FREETOWN --World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim announced a $160 million two-year economic recovery plan on Wednesday to help impoverished Sierra Leone battle the worst Ebola outbreak on record.

Kim said after a closed-door meeting with President Ernest Bai Koroma in Freetown the cash would go towards regional operations centres and emergency response teams in the hard-hit west and north of the country.

The aid would also focus on the country's floundering farming sector and rural job creation, he told reporters...

Kim flew to Conakry later on Wednesday, where he was expected to meet government officials and health experts.
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http://www.straitstimes.com/news/world/more-world-stories/story/world-bank-announces-200-million-ebola-hit-sierra-leone-20141204

AFP                                                                                                          Dec. 2, 2014

FREETOWN -- Ebola-hit Sierra Leone has quarantined hundreds of thousands more citizens, it said Tuesday, sealing off a sixth district, with more than half of the country's population already under lockdown.

A nurse wearing personal protective equipment checks on a patient at the Kenama ebola treatment center run by the Red Cross Society on November 15, 2014 in Sierra Leone ©Francisco Leong (AFP/File)

Tonkolili, in the centre, was added to the growing list of districts which no one is allowed to leave or enter without special dispensation, in an effort to combat an outbreak which is spiralling out of control, with 1,400 deaths so far....

The northern districts of Port Loko and Bombali were closed off indefinitely along with the southern district of Moyamba in September -- effectively sealing in more than one million people.

INSTITUTE FOR SECURITY STUDIES                                                                                Dec. 2, 2014

Morocco’s refusal to host the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) from 17 January to 8 February next year, due to fears of Ebola,has sparked a furore among soccer lovers across the continent.

The North African kingdom has since become the target of some of the most aggressive xenophobia from fellow Africans, notably on social media. ‘Morocco is scared of outsiders,’ ‘Morocco is not an African country,’ are some of the insults that have been directed at the country in the wake of its decision.

... The competition has now been moved to Equatorial Guinea, co-host of the 2012 Afcon with Gabon. This decision has huge financial and political implications. Morocco has also been barred from participating in the 2015 Afcon, and risks more sanctions for its national team and Moroccan clubs.

REUTERS-by  Misha Hussain                                   Dec. 3, 2014

DAKAR, Senegal   - Some five million children are out of school in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone because of the deadly Ebola outbreak, according to a report by the Global Business Coalition for Education.

A man walks by a mural with health instructions on treating the Ebola virus, in Monrovia, November 18, 2014. Credit: Reuters/James Giahyue

Schools and other public buildings have been closed because they are believed to increase the spread of the virus. Many are now used as holding centers for Ebola patients.

The report, co-written with A World at School, said being out of school can have a crippling impact on vulnerable children, especially girls, who are more likely to face high-risk situations as a result, including early marriage and pregnancy.

If schools are not reopened, the most vulnerable children will become trapped in a cycle of poverty with devastating consequences for their health and economic development, the report said.

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100resilientcities.org - by Michael Berkowitz - December 2, 2014

Today we proudly announce the second group of cities selected to join 100 Resilient Cities – cities who have demonstrated a commitment to building their own capacities to navigate the shocks and stresses of an increasingly complex 21st Century.

During the our first 18 months, we've seen our first cohort of cities mature, appoint chief resilience officers, and embark on their own resilience strategy processes. No doubt this momentum contributed to the immense response we saw to the second round of the 100 Resilient Cities Challenge has been enormous, with 331 exceptional applications from cities around the world, submitted in seven languages.

voanews.com - by Deborah Block - Nov 26, 2014



On Thanksgiving day in the United States, Americans give thanks for their blessings. Among them is Bobby Smith, who emigrated to here 25 years ago from Sierra Leone. To give back, three years ago Smith began a small volunteer organization, Hope for Lives in Sierra Leone, to help the disadvantaged in his homeland -- one of the poorest countries in the world. As VOA’s Deborah Block reports, he now is sending medical supplies to help combat Ebola, which continues to devastate Sierra Leone.

http://www.voanews.com/media/video/sierra-leonean-in-us-sends-medical-supplies-home-to-combat-ebola/2535979.html

by Shalini Saxena - Nov 30 2014 - http://arstechnica.com

We know what antibodies stop it in its tracks—we now know where they attach.

The latest Ebola outbreak has dwarfed any that have occurred since the discovery of the virus in 1976; previous outbreaks have had lethality rates of up to 90 percent. Yet no vaccines or therapies are currently approved for human use, which limits our ability to treat patients and contain the outbreak. Mixtures of monoclonal antibodies (see sidebar) are a potential treatment option that has been used experimentally.

by Elizabeth Barber - Dec. 1, 2014 - time.com

The U.N. mission is urging that the longer the disease is allowed to storm West Africa, the more likely it is that the virus will reappear elsewhere in the world.

The head of the U.N. Ebola mission in West Africa has said there is a “huge risk” of the Ebola outbreak expanding beyond the hard-hit region.

https://time.com/3611314/u-n-ebola-global-threat-anthony-banbury-bbc/

BBC   by Andrew Harding                                    Dec. 2, 2014

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone --

... "By now, everyone knows about Ebola; and nobody with symptoms should, logically, be dying at home or on the street anymore.

Sometimes suspected Ebola cases are not reported to the health authorities

They should all have been taken to hospital.

But to understand why that is not happening, all you have to do is drive to any of the impoverished suburbs of Freetown..."

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30279932

With trials under way, scientists are working out how to give vaccines in affected regions

NATURE   By Ewan Callaway                                                                                                 Dec. 2, 2014

Safety trials of Ebola vaccines are starting to return results: at least one is known to be safe and to summon an immune response against the virus.

The challenge now is to use the results to guide the larger studies that will reveal whether the vaccines work.

“The immune responses are there,” says infectious-disease researcher Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute in Oxford, UK. “The tough call is whether they’re enough to protect humans against Ebola.”

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http://www.nature.com/news/positive-results-spur-race-for-ebola-vaccine-1.16468

DISCOVER MAGAZINE    By Kari Lydersen                                                                              Dec. 2, 2014
.....redicting the trajectory of Ebola rather than playing catching-up could do much to help prevent and contain the disease. Some experts have called for prioritizing mobile treatment units that can be quickly relocated to the spots most needed. Figuring out where Ebola is likely to strike next or finding emerging hot spots early on would be key to the placement of these treatment centers.

But such modeling requires data, and lots of it.  And for stressed healthcare workers on the ground and government and non-profit agencies scrambling to combat a raging epidemic, collecting and disseminating data is often not a high priority.

ASSOCIATED PRESS                                                                                                        Dec. 2, 2014 

BETHESDA, Maryland  — Declaring the "fight is nowhere close to being over," President Barack Obama on Tuesday heralded strides in the effort to confront Ebola in West Africa and in protecting the U.S. against the spread of the deadly virus. He said squelching the disease remains an urgent priority even if the American public's attention has shifted elsewhere.

"We cannot let down our guard, even for minute," Obama said. "We can't just fight this epidemic, we have to extinguish it."

Obama spoke after touring the National Institutes of Health in Washington's Maryland suburbs where he witnessed advances in Ebola-fighting research. He highlighted the NIH's progress in developing an Ebola vaccine, calling the initial results "exciting" while cautioning that there are "no guarantees" about the vaccine's ultimate success.

NIH researchers last week reported that the first safety study of a vaccine candidate found no serious side effects, and that it triggered signs of immune protection in 20 volunteers. U.S. health officials are planning much larger studies in West Africa to try to determine if the shots really work...

IRIN                                                              Dec. 1, 2014

DAKAR--It is next to impossible to avoid physical contact in an overcrowded prison. In Sierra Leone, heavily congested jails and a worsening Ebola outbreak make a potentially lethal combination. So how do you keep inmates safe?

                          Decongesting prisons in Sierra Leone to lower Ebola threat.Photo: Hannah McNeish/IRIN

Some of the safeguards against the virus are: A 21-day quarantine for fresh detainees before joining the old timers; training prison health workers and inmate leaders on Ebola prevention; and providing health and safety education and equipment.

Such measures, and others, have so far helped keep the virus out of Sierra Leone’s 17 prisons and three juvenile offenders’ homes, said Mambu Feika, head of NGO Prison Watch Sierra Leone (PWSL), which is spearheading a three-month programme to prevent Ebola transmission in prisons.

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WASHINGTON POST-- By Lena H. Sun                                                                                         Dec. 2, 2014

WASHINGTON --U.S. officials have designated 35 hospitals around the country to care for Ebola patients, part of the Obama administration’s effort in the past two months to improve domestic preparedness to cope with the deadly virus that has ravaged West Africa.

 

A nurse walks down a hallway alongside a patient care room in a new custom-built bio-containment unit for potential Ebola cases at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York. (John Minchillo/AP)

 The hospitals were chosen by state health officials and hospital executives and assessed by infection control teams from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to make sure they have adequate staff, equipment, training and resources “to provide the extensive treatment necessary to care for an Ebola patient,” according to a senior administration official.