How robots could be used to fight Ebola    

(Two stories, scroll down)

TECH  TIMES                                               Nov. 9, 2014
Dianne Depra

With the Ebola virus claiming nearly 5,000 lives, it's understandable why the White House is now considering options outside of traditional means to help curb the outbreak, enlisting robot technology to join in the fight.

Officials gathered together specialists on Nov. 7, holding discussions at University of California, Berkeley, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Texas A&M University to talk about how robots can be utilized to aid health workers in West Africa.

The day was intended to inspire research committees in various sectors to assess how they may be able to take advantage of innovation and technology and assist the international effort against Ebola, according to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

See related story:

ASSOCIATED PRESS                                   Nov. 8, 2014

REBAT-- Morocco is sticking to its demand to postpone the African Cup of Nations football tournament due to the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, despite pressure from the Confederation of African Football.

A statement from the Ministry of Sports late Saturday said that because of the "spread of the deadly Ebola pandemic," Morocco was maintaining its call for delaying the tournament it is scheduled to host from Jan. 17-Feb. 8, to the following year.

The Confederation of African Football has repeatedly rejected calls to postpone the tournament and last Monday gave Morocco five days to agree to hold the tournament as scheduled or they would reassign it.

The body will meet again on Tuesday to make a final decision on whether the tournament will be delayed or assigned to another country.

Read complete story

http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/morocco-insists-delaying-african-cup-ebola-26781383

HOMELAND SECURITY NEWS WIRE                        Nov.7, 2014

Federal and state funds for local health agencies have been cut over the past few years, so when hospitals and municipal health agencies are asked proactively to respond to possible threats of Ebola, many question how they will fund such activities. Since 2008, at least 51,000 state and local public health jobs (roughly 20 percent), have been lost due to cuts in federal funding, according to a new survey by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO). Next week, the Senate Committee on Appropriations will hold a hearingto consider additional funding to prepare for an Ebola outbreak.

“It’s critically important to have a sustainable infrastructure, tools and the necessary resources to effectively address all potential health threats to the public, not just Ebola,” said James Blumenstock, emergency preparedness officer for ASTHO. “Public health threats don’t come one at a time, especially this time of year.”

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ASSOCIATED PRESS                                              Nov. 7, 2014
WASHINGTON -- The top U.S. military officer has designated five U.S. bases where American troops would be housed and isolated for 21 days upon returning from Africa after serving in the Ebolaresponse mission, U.S. officials said Friday.

Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed a plan that lists Fort Hood and Fort Bliss, Texas; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington; and Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, as bases where troops would be quarantined.

The U.S. also will use two bases in Italy and Germany for returning troops based in that region....

The plan exempts military personnel who travel to Africa for short-term visits and have very limited contact with people there, such as military staff traveling with a senior official who only stops in the country for a day or two...

In a related announcement, U.S. Northern Command has decided to train 30 more medical support personnel who will be available to help U.S. hospitals with any future Ebola cases. The personnel will begin training in San Antonio, Texas, later this month and will supplement a 30-member team that has already been trained and is ready to respond.

ASSOCIATED PRESS                                                NOV. 8, 2014
By Jennifer Peltz
NEW YORK  .....As Ebola-related quarantine policies have arisen around the United States, some health workers are reassessing whether, or how long, they can be among the hundreds that officials say are needed to fight the outbreak.

Potential volunteers are anxious about what they might come back to, especially after seeing new rules arise so rapidly that nurse Kaci Hickox was sequestered in a medical tent for days because New Jersey announced new regulations the day she flew back from Sierra Leone. Others are facing family qualms. And as the year winds down, some aid workers wonder whether they'll be able to go home for the holidays.

Aid organizations say it's too soon to tell whether quarantine rules are significantly shrinking the number of volunteers, but the measures are complicating an already challenging search for help treating a disease that has killed nearly 5,000 people, including about 310 health care workers.

Some potential volunteers are wary of not only being quarantined but being seen as potential disease-carriers, rather than conscientious professionals.

BBC                                                   Nov. 8 2014

Top African business leaders have established an emergency fund to help countries hit by the Ebola outbreak.

A pledging meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised $28.5m to deploy at least 1,000 health workers to Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia..... 

It is not clear why exactly the number of cases in Liberia has dipped - but it has been running an awareness campaign to advertise best health practices and install hand washing stations.

Speaking at the end of the Addis Abada meeting, African Union chairman Dlamini Zuma said the resources mobilised would be part of a longer term programme to deal with such outbreaks in the future.

The chairman of telecommunications giant Econet Wireless, Strive Masiyiwa, said that several companies had pledged money to the emergency fund - to be managed by the African Development Bank.

See complete story

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29967124

Researchers often describe the battle between the Ebola virus and the humans it occasionally infects as a race—one that people win only if their immune systems manage to pull ahead before the virus destroys too many of their internal defenses. What they may not know is that the virus is a cheat.

NPR                                                                                                                                   Nov. 7, 2014

By Jason Beaubien
CONAKRY  Guinea-- In the current Ebola crisis, much of the focus has been on Liberia and Sierra Leone. But the virus also continues to spread in Guinea, where the first case in the current outbreak was identified in March.

Red Cross workers in Guinea carry the body of an Ebola victim to a cemetery full of fresh graves for others who have succumbed to the disease.

According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization, Guinea has had fewer cases than either Sierra Leone (4,759) or Liberia (6,525). WHO has recorded 1,731 Ebola cases and 1,041 deaths in Guinea. This, however, is just a few dozen fatalities fewer than in Sierra Leone. And despite the lower numbers in Guinea, some data suggest the outbreak is spreading faster there than in the neighboring countries.

Q&A with Marc Poncin, response coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Conakry, Guinea:

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS                                     NOV. 17, 2014

BERLIN  The World Health Organization has released a 17-page manual detailing how to safely bury people who have died from Ebola.

The U.N. agency said Friday the guidelines are part of an effort to reduce the likelihood of people contracting Ebola from corpses.

WHO Ebola expert Pierre Formenty says at least one in five infections occur during burials.

The guidelines give step-by-step advice to health workers for both Christian and Muslim burials.

See complete article
http://news.yahoo.com/un-releases-manual-safe-ebola-burials-154352654.html

See WHO manual

http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/137379/1/WHO_EVD_GUIDANCE_Burials_14.2_eng.pdf?ua=1

http://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/ebola/safe-burial-protocol/en/

NEW ORLEANS --The quest for an Ebola treatment is picking up speed. Federal officials have unveiled a plan to test multiple drugs at once, in an umbrella study with a single comparison group to give fast answers on what works.

"This is novel for us" and is an approach pioneered by cancer researchers, said Dr. Luciana Borio, head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Ebola response. "We need to learn what helps and what hurts" and speed treatments to patients, she said.

She outlined the plan Wednesday at an American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene conference in New Orleans....

Everyone in the umbrella study would get supportive care, such as intravenous fluids, then be assigned to receive one of several drugs or be in a comparison group. That's needed because without one, there's no way to know if any problems or deaths are from the drug or the disease, Cox said....

REUTERS                                                     Nov. 7, 2014
By Sharon Begley

NEW YORK - A group of scientists including three Nobel laureates in medicine has proposed that U.S. health officials chart a new path to developing Ebola drugs and vaccines by harnessing antibodies produced by survivors of the deadly outbreak.

The proposal builds on the use of "convalescent serum," or survivors' blood, which has been given to at least four U.S. Ebola patients who then recovered from the virus. It is based on an approach called passive immunization, which has been used since the 19th century to treat diseases such as diphtheria but has been largely surpassed by vaccination.

The scientists propose using new genetic and other technologies to find hundreds or thousands of different Ebola antibodies, determine their genetic recipe, grow them in commercial quantities and combine them into a single treatment analogous to the multi-drug cocktails that treat HIV-AIDS.

Read complete story

http://www.trust.org/item/20141107142347-pfohr

                                                                     Nov. 6, 2014

...a WHO-coordinated retrospective study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, provides evidence that supportive care, especially rehydration and correction of metabolic abnormalities, may contribute to patient survival.

The study analysed clinical data on 37 confirmed Ebola patients admitted for treatment at hospitals in Conakry, Guinea’s capital and most densely populated city.

The cases occurred during the first month of West Africa’s first outbreak of Ebola virus disease. Fourteen of the patients were heath care workers. The majority (12) acquired their infection in a health care setting.

The majority (65%) of patients were male, countering assumptions that women, who are more likely to provide home care for patients and prepare bodies for funerals and burials, are more frequently exposed and infected.

To replace fluids lost through severe diarrhoea, 36 patients (97%) received oral rehydration solution. Additional intravenous fluid resuscitation was given to 28 (76%) patients.

Read complete press release

ABC NEWS                                                                                                            Nov 7, 2014

by  Sydney Ludkin 

DALLAS The final person in Texas being monitored for Ebola has passed the virus's 21-day incubation period, marking the end of the state's Ebola crisis.

None of the 177 people who had contact with the state's Ebola patients -- Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, and two of the Dallas nurses who cared for him, Nina Pham and Amber Vinson -- have contracted Ebola, state officials said. The list included health care workers, people who shared the same households as the Ebola patients and other community contacts.

"Hopefully, Americans will be relieved and fear will be eased," said Dr. Richard Besser, ABC News chief health and medical editor. "In Dallas, not even the people who lived with a very sick person with Ebola became ill."

Read complete story

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/person-completes-ebola-monitoring-texas/story?id=26742640

ASSOCIATED PRESS                                   NOV. 7, 2014

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N.'s Ebola chief said an extraordinary global response over the past month has made him hopeful the outbreak could end in 2015, though he cautioned that the fight to contain the disease is not even a quarter done.

"Until the last case of Ebola is under treatment, we have to stay on full alert," Dr. David Nabarro said Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press. "It's still bad."

Nabarro said a month ago that the number of Ebola cases was probably doubling every three-to-four weeks. He warned then that without a mass global mobilization, "the world will have to live with the Ebola virus forever" and that the response needed to be 20 times greater.

But in the past four weeks, the rate of Ebola infections seems to be slowing in some parts of West Africa, Nabarro said in the interview. In other hotspots, he said, it appears to be expanding the way it was a month ago.

Read complete story

An overview of the numbers of Ebola cases in Africa and elsewhere.
ASSOCIATED PRESS                                                 NOV. 17, 2014b
By Maria Cheng, AP Medical Writer
LONDON --As the biggest-ever outbreak of Ebola continues to ravage West Africa, here are a few key numbers to get a handle on the epidemic:

13,042 and 4,818:

Medical workers wearing protective equipment surround a simulated patient during a demonstration for media members on their training for working with possible Ebola patients, Thursday, Nov. 6, 2014, at Madigan Army Medical Center on Joint Base Lewis McChord, near Tacoma, Wash. Madigan providers and nurses have been training to perform clinical skills, including inserting IVs, obtaining blood samples for testing and conducting ultrasounds while dressed in powered air purifying respirators, impermeable suits and multiple layers of gloves. The clinically-focused exercises use realistic patient simulators that speak through microphones and can express simulated bodily fluids. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) Close The Associated Press