It's been 42 days since the last new case

TIME MAGAZINE                                                      OCT. 20, 2014

Alexandra Sifferlin

 The World Health Organization declared Nigeria free of Ebola on Monday, a containment victory in an outbreak that has stymied other countries’ response efforts....

A school official takes a pupil's temperature using an infrared digital laser thermometer in front of the school premises, at the resumption of private schools, in Lagos, Sept. 22, 2014. Akintunde Akinleye—Reuters

“It’s possible to control Ebola. It’s possible to defeat Ebola. We’ve seen it here in Nigeria,” Nigerian Minister of Health Onyebuchi Chukwu told TIME. “If any cases emerge in the future, it will be considered—by international standards—a separate outbreak. If that happens, Nigeria will be ready and able to confront it exactly as we have done with this outbreak.”

ROUNDUP OF DEVELOPMENTS SUNDAY

REUTERS                                     Oct 19, 2014

By Erwin Seba

GALVESTON Texas --(Reuters) - The United States will issue strict new guidelines telling American health workers to cover their skin and hair when dealing with Ebola patients, a top health official said on Sunday, while some of the dozens of people being watched for possible exposure to the virus are expected to be cleared.

 A health care worker receives protocol on the proper removal of personal protection equipment from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) instructors in preparation for the response to the current Ebola outbreak, during a CDC safety training course in Anniston, Alabama, October 6, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Tami Chappell

In Texas, a lab worker who spent much of a Caribbean holiday cruise in isolation tested negative for the deadly virus and left the Carnival Magic liner with other passengers after it docked at Galveston early on Sunday morning....

RT – Thom Hartmann - The Bigger Picture: Ebola – October 17-18, 2014

Dr. Michael D. McDonald, Robert Walker and DeAnn McEwen – A Discussion on Ebola

To stop Ebola from spreading in West Africa, Dr. Michael D. McDonald, Executive Director of Health Initiatives Foundation Inc. and the Global Resilience System talks about the need to have community strategies where we set up Resilience Capacity Zones to reduce the transmission and the translocation of Ebola. He states we need to create behavioral and social immunity around Ebola-affected areas to reduce the transmission and translocation. We need to create Ebola-resistant, and Ebola-free zones in ring-like fashion.

CLICK HERE - The Bigger Picture: Ebola

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZlUp_aVgxc

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.