No Identifiable Common Source of Exposure Found in Cluster of Ebola Cases Among Health Care Workers in Liberia

CDC Changes Ebola Care Guidelines for U.S. Hospitals After Dallas Case

      

Environmental-Cleaning Guys sprayed disinfectant Sunday outside the apartment complex on Marquita Street where the nurse who contracted Ebola lives. The hospital parking lot she uses and her car were also decontaminated, officials said.  Jim Tuttle/Staff Photographer

dallasnews.com - by Jeffrey Weiss - October 14, 2014

Ebola care instructions at a Dallas hospital and across the country were changed by federal officials on Monday — a tacit admission that training and procedures used for America’s first case of the disease had come up short.

The changes were prompted by the discovery that a nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas had become infected while treating Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died of Ebola in the hospital last Wednesday.

The transmission of the deadly virus to the nurse “doesn’t change the fact that it’s possible to take care of Ebola safely. But it does change substantially how we approach it,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control, because even a single infection is unacceptable.”

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" 10 drugs that could stop Ebola "

FIERCE BOIOTECH RESEARCH                       Oct. 14, 2014
By Emily Mullin

Before the current Ebola outbreak, the virus had only appeared in Africa in fits and starts since its discovery in 1976, receding back into the jungle almost as quickly as it arrived. This relative rarity and the swiftness with which the disease kills its victims has, up until now, made Ebola an unattractive--not to mention daunting--prospect for drug developers. As a result, no approved drugs or vaccines against Ebola exist.

...the current situation in West Africa... has prompted the World Health Organization to call on international government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry to work together to speed up the development of promising therapies for experimental use for those most at risk of contracting the disease, which causes severe hemorrhagic fever.

Now, a handful of players are racing to get a treatment or vaccine to patients as quickly as possible, even though these drugs remain largely untested in humans.... 

Here is a list of organizations that are in the global spotlight right now with their investigational Ebola program

See full story and list

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Head of World Bank Makes Ebola His Mission

NEW YORK TIMES                                                                                        OCT. 14, 2014

By                         

During a tense discussion, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank president, spoke sharply to Dr. Margaret Chan, the head of the World Health Organization, the agency in charge. You have the authority to act in this emergency, he told her, according to people familiar with the meeting, “so why aren’t you doing it?”

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Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg Kicks in $25 Million for Ebola

NBC NEWS                                                            OCT. 14, 2014

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife announced Tuesday they are donating $25 million to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control foundation to fight the Ebola crisis that has killed more than 4,440 people in west Africa.

"We need to get Ebola under control in the near term so that it doesn't spread further and become a long term global health crisis that we end up fighting for decades at large scale, like HIV or polio," Zuckerberg, who is worth $32 billion, said in a Facebook post. "We believe our grant is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field to prevent this outcome."

The health agency has hundreds of staffers working on Ebola and has sent more than 100 experts to the virus zone — Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. The CDC foundation collects funds for supplies, such as personal protective equipment, ready-to-eat meals, generators, vehicles and motorcycles, and thermal scanners to detect fever.

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The reassuring news in the Texas Ebola cases

WASHINGTON POST

By Todd C. Frankel                         October 14

....The Dallas nurse, 26-year old Nina Pham,who helped treat Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who was the first person diagnosed with the dreaded disease in the United States became the first – and so far only – person infected by Duncan. In the wake of her infection, U.S. health officials have pledged to review how future Ebola cases are handled.

But the case is also noteworthy for another, potentially positive reason: Nearly 50 people were exposed to Ebola before the nurse, and none of them has been diagnosed with the disease.

This group of neighbors, family members and first responders are being watched carefully by health authorities. They had some degree of close contact with Duncan during the four-day period when he was contagious – from when he started showing Ebola symptoms on Sept. 24 to when the hospital finally admitted him on Sept. 28. They didn’t take any Ebola-specific precautions. They didn’t know he was infected.... Yet, so far, they have not gotten sick. And their 21-day Ebola incubation period started before Pham’s.

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WHO: Ebola spreading in W. Africa, threatens Ivory Coast; some areas see fewer cases

THE WASHINGTON POST
By Joel Achenbach                                                  October 14 at 9:15 AM

The World Health Organization issued a mixed report Tuesday on progress in the fight against the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, noting that the number of new cases is dropping in some areas that had been hit hard by the virus earlier this year. But the disease is spreading across a broader geographical region, including along the Ivory Coast border, and continues to be rampant in some capital cities.

Ebola is killing 70 percent of the people who become infected, said Bruce Aylward, WHO assistant director-general overseeing the organization’s response to the West Africa epidemic. In a conference call with journalists, he said the official statistics do not capture the true lethality of the virus.

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‘A teenage girl bled to death over two days’: Ebola nurses describe life and death on the frontline

An Ebola health worker is decontaminated at a Médecins sans Frontières unit in Monrovia in Liberia.
Photograph: Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty Images

theguardian.com - by Bridget Mulrooney, Sue Ellen Kovack and Anine Kongelf - October 13, 2014

Bridget Mulrooney, 36
American nurse working for the International Medical Corps in Bong County, Liberia

I was working as a travel nurse at a children’s hospital in California when I got an email from International Medical Corps asking if I was interested in deploying to Liberia to help fight Ebola. I wanted to go immediately but I was locked into a contract at the time. The more I heard, the more excited I got.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

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Medical official dies of Ebola in German hospital

The Guardian,                      Tuesday 14 October 2014 06.22 EDT

 

Berlin --A UN employee infected with Ebola has died in Germany, officials say.

The 56-year-old Sudanese man had been flown from Liberia to Leipzig last Thursday, where he received treatment at a specialist unit at the St Georg clinic.

On his arrival, doctors at the hospital had described his condition as “highly critical, but stable”. On Tuesday morning the clinic confirmed in a statement that their patient had died on Monday night, “in spite of intensive medical measures and the best efforts on behalf of the medical staff”.

The Leipzig clinic has assured the public that there is no risk of infection for people in the area. The man had arrived in Germany on a specially adapted Gulfstream jet with an isolation chamber, and had been treated on an isolation unit by staff wearing protective gear.

Read full story
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/14/un-medical-official-dies-ebola-german-hospital

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Ebola outbreak threatens peace, security, WHO chief says

GENEVA — The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is “unquestionably the most severe acute public health emergency in modern times,” Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, said Monday.

Chan, who dealt with the 2009 avian flu pandemic and the SARS outbreaks of 2002-03, said the Ebola outbreak had progressed from a public health crisis to “a crisis for international peace and security.”

“I have never seen a health event threaten the very survival of societies and governments in already very poor countries,” she said in a statement delivered on her behalf to a conference in Manila, Philippines, and released by her office in Geneva. “I have never seen an infectious disease contribute so strongly to potential state failure.”

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WHO and Partners agree on a common approach to strengthen Ebola preparedness in unaffected countries

Brazzaville, 10 October 2014 - The World Health Organization (WHO) and partner organizations meeting in Brazzaville have agreed on a range of core actions to support countries unaffected by Ebola in strengthening their preparedness in the event of an outbreak.

Building on national and international existing preparedness efforts, a set of tools is being developed to help any country to intensify and accelerate their readiness.

One of these tools is a comprehensive checklist of core principles, standards, capacities and practices, which all countries should have or meet. The checklist can be used by countries to assess their level of preparedness, guide their efforts to strengthen themselves and to request assistance. Items on the checklist include infection prevention control, contact tracing, case management, surveillance, laboratory capacity, safe burial, public awareness and community engagement and national legislation and regulation to support country readiness.

“While we rightly focus on stopping the outbreak in affected countries, we should not forget that all other countries are at risk, albeit at varying levels”, said WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Luis Sambo.

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Tweets About Ebola - NowTrending.HHS.gov

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Family Identifies Ebola Patient

wfaa.com - by marjorie Owens - October 13, 2014

DALLAS — A Dallas nurse diagnosed with the Ebola virus over the weekend is a former Texas Christian University student identified by a family member as 26-year-old Nina Pham.

The family reached out to News 8 Monday morning and shared an image of the nurse who grew up in Fort Worth.

A health care worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, Pham became infected while treating Thomas Eric Duncan, who died from the virus days before the nurse's diagnosis.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

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Ebola Vaccine Would Likely Have Been Found By Now If Not For Budget Cuts: NIH Director

HUFFINGTON POST

By Sam Stein                                                              Updated Oct. 13 ,2014

BETHESDA, Md. -- As the federal government frantically works to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and as it responds to a second diagnosis of the disease at home, one of the country's top health officials says a vaccine likely would have already been discovered were it not for budget cuts.

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has "slowed down" research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.

"NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and thought, 'Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'" Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."

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Hospitals should ‘think Ebola,’ CDC director says

CDC: U.S. has to rethink the way it addresses Ebola infection control

ASSOCIATED PRESS                                                            Oct. 13, 2014

By Connie Cass

DALLAS --Every hospital must know how to diagnose Ebola in people who have been in West Africa and be ready to isolate a suspected case, Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday.

He said the CDC is working to improve protections for hospital workers after a nurse caring for an Ebola patient in Dallas became the first person to become infected with the disease inside the U.S.

‘‘We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control,’’ Frieden said, ‘‘because even a single infection is unacceptable.’’

The CDC is scrambling to interview all staff of the Dallas hospital who could have been exposed to the patient, a Liberian man who became sick after traveling to the United States and died at the hospital. Anyone at risk will be monitored, he said.

‘‘We need to consider the possibility that there could be additional cases, particularly among the health care workers who cared for the index patient’’ — the Liberian man — ‘‘when he was so ill,’’ Frieden said.

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