nejm.org - October 15, 2014 - DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1411099

Results

The outbreak began in Inkanamongo village in the vicinity of Boende town in Équateur province and has been confined to that province. A total of 69 suspected, probable, or confirmed cases were reported between July 26 and October 7, 2014, including 8 cases among health care workers, with 49 deaths. As of October 7, there have been approximately six generations of cases of EVD since the outbreak began. The reported weekly case incidence peaked in the weeks of August 17 and 24 and has since fallen sharply. Genome sequencing revealed Ebola virus (EBOV, Zaire species) as the cause of this outbreak. A coding-complete genome sequence of EBOV that was isolated during this outbreak showed 99.2% identity with the most closely related variant from the 1995 outbreak in Kikwit in the DRC and 96.8% identity to EBOV variants that are currently circulating in West Africa. . . .

UPDATE   Ebola fear ends for dozens on U.S. watch lists                        

REUTERS                                                               Oct. 20, 2014

By Anna Driver

DALLAS--Weeks of worry about Ebola infection ended on Monday for several dozen people who came off watch lists in the United States, but more than 260 others were still being monitored for symptoms as the U.S. government ramped up its response to the virus.

In Texas, 43 people who had contact with Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with the disease in the United States, were cleared of twice-daily monitoring after showing no symptoms during a 21-day incubation period. The Texas health department said they included four people who shared an apartment with Duncan and had been in quarantine. It said 120 people in Texas were still being monitored.

Image: An experimental Ebola vaccine has been developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. Photograph by Steve Parsons, AP

news.nationalgeographic.com - October 14th, 2014 - Karen Weintraub

Ebola vaccines are so effective in monkeys that macaques can be protected or rescued even if they're injected with a hundred times the lethal dose of the Ebola virus after vaccination. But no one knows for certain whether the vaccines will work in humans; the vaccines haven't yet been rigorously tested in people.

Just developing the vaccines to test in monkeys was a grueling, decades-long process that has killed scores of macaques since the 1990s.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

environmentalleader.com - October 16th, 2014

By 2020 the world economy could be facing a skills deficit driven by mega-trends such as population growth, increasing demand for natural resources, and soaring costs of energy, coupled with the impacts of climate change and ecosystem degradation, according to a report by the Institute of Environmental Management & Awareness.

Although the transition to a sustainable economy presents significant opportunities for business, according to an IEMA survey of over 900 organizations, only 13 percent of companies are fully confident that they have the skills to successfully compete in the sustainable economy.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

nejm.org - WHO Ebola Response Team

N Engl J Med 2014; 371:1481-1495 - October 16, 2014 - DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1411100

Conclusions

These data indicate that without drastic improvements in control measures, the numbers of cases of and deaths from EVD are expected to continue increasing from hundreds to thousands per week in the coming months.

(SEE COMPLETE NEJM ARTICLE HERE)

NEJM - Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa — The First 9 Months of the Epidemic and Forward Projections (15 page .PDF file)

USA TODAY                                                     Oct. 19, 2014

BY Gregg Zoroya and John Bacon

The Pentagon will build a 30-person, rapid-response Ebola medical support team to aid civilian health care workers should additional cases of the virus be diagnosed in the U.S., officials said Sunday.

The effort was requested by the Department of Health and Human Services "as an added prudent measure to ensure our nation is ready to respond quickly, effectively and safely in the event of additional Ebola cases," a Pentagon statement said.

http://www.defense.gov/Releases/Release.aspx?ReleaseID=16986

The Pentagon said Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered his Northern Command Commander, Gen. Chuck Jacoby, to prepare and train the team. It will include 20 critical-care nurses, five doctors trained in infectious disease and five trainers in infectious-disease protocols...

Team members will remain in a "prepare to deploy" status for 30 days after training. They will not be sent to West Africa or elsewhere overseas and "will be called upon domestically only if deemed prudent by our public health professionals," the statement said.

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Four suggestions on what we need to successfully counter Ebola

A healthcare worker mixes chlorine with water at an Ebola treatment center in Hastings, Freetown, Sierra Leone, Oct. 15. Associated Press

Suggestions include:

Dallas Health Presbyterian Hospital: Two stories on the aftermath of the treatment of Thomas Eric Duncan the first person to die in the U.S. of Ebola and the infection of two nurses.

Dallas hospital tried to repair reputation after a series of mishaps.

WASHINGTON POST               Oct. 18, 2014
By Lena H. Sun

Read full story 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/dallas-hospital-tries-to-repair-its-reputation/2014/10/17/dfb62dc4-55fa-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html

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Ebola lapses persisted for days at Dallas hospital

ASSOCIATED PRESS                                  Oct. 18, 2014

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ebola-lapses-persisted-for-days-at-dallas-hospital/2014/10/18/8f9bf97a-56dd-11e4-b86d-184ac281388d_story.html

THE INDEPENDENT                                                  OCT. 18, 2014

LONDON ---Ebola is poised to become the “definitive humanitarian disaster of our generation", Oxfam has warned, with more troops, funding and medical aid urgently needed to tackle the outbreak.

In an "extremely rare" move, the charity is calling for military intervention to provide logistical support across West Africa.

It says the world has less than two months to counter the spread of the deadly virus, which means addressing a "crippling shortfall" in military personnel.

Oxfam’s call for more troops comes after UN chief Ban Ki-Moon criticised countries he said were able to provide financial support to the crisis for not doing so.
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NEW YORK TIMES                                                 Oct. 18, 2014

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Beneath the calming reassurance that President Obama has repeatedly offered during the Ebola crisis, there is a deepening frustration, even anger, with how the government has handled key elements of the response.

Those frustrations spilled over when Mr. Obama convened his top aides in the Cabinet room after canceling his schedule on Wednesday. Medical officials were providing information that later turned out to be wrong. Guidance to local health teams was not adequate. It was unclear which Ebola patients belonged in which threat categories.

CANADIAN PRESS                                     Oct. 18, 2014

OTTAWA—The federal government says Canada will start shipping its experimental Ebola vaccine to the World Health Organization on Monday.

WASHINGTON POST

By Katie Zezima                               Oct. 18. 2014

WASHINGTON -Public health officials have been nearly unanimous in rejecting the idea of a travel ban between the United States and the West African countries at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak.

But the drumbeat from politicians demanding Ebola-related restrictions on travel intensified Friday as a number of moderate Democrats joined the chorus, including Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina, who is enmeshed in a tough reelection fight, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and Michelle Nunn, who is running for Senate in Georgia....

The calls have alarmed public health experts, who said a travel ban could result in the opposite of its intention and spread the virus throughout West Africa and beyond.

“It’s an 18th-century view that you can somehow place a cellophane wrapper around a whole region of the world and expect to keep germs out. It doesn’t work that way because it’s never worked,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Public Health Law & Human Rights.

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THE GUARDIAN                              Oct. 18, 2014

WASHINGTON- President Barack Obama on Saturday urged Americans not to succumb to hysteria about Ebola, even as he warned that addressing the deadly virus would require citizens, government leaders and the media to all pitch in.

in his weekly address, Obama also pushed back against calls for the US to institute a travel ban. Lawmakers have called it a commonsense step to prevent more people with Ebola from entering the US, but Obama said such a ban would only hamper aid efforts and screening measures.

“Trying to seal off an entire region of the world – if that were even possible – could actually make the situation worse,” the president said.

Growing US concern about Ebola and the three cases diagnosed so far in Dallas prompted Obama on Friday to tap a former top White House adviser to be his point person on Ebola. Striking a careful balance, Obama said there was no “outbreak” or “epidemic” of Ebola in the US, but said even one case was too many.

“This is a serious disease, but we can’t give in to hysteria or fear – because that only makes it harder to get people the accurate information they need,” Obama said. “We have to be guided by the science.”

Dr. Steven Hatch carried Blessing Gea, 9, into the high-risk ward. Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

nytimes.com - by Sheri Fink - October 16, 2014

SUAKOKO, Liberia — The first time Dr. Steven Hatch suited up in protective gear at an Ebola treatment center, he was confronted with the weight of his decision to volunteer here. A patient, sweating and heavily soiled, had collapsed in a corridor. “Literally every surface of his body was covered in billions of particles of Ebola,” he recalled.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)