WASHINGTON POST's  detailed front page account of how the Ebola epidemic got out of control in West Africa.  Oct. 5, 2014

     by Lena Sun, Bradly Dennis, Lenny Bernstein and Joel Achenbach

The glow from a crematorium lights the sky as the bodies of people who died from Ebola are cremated last month in Monrovia

---Michel Du Cille, THE WASHINGTON POST

.... "The virus easily outran the plodding response. The WHO, an arm of the United Nations, is responsible for coordinating international action in a crisis like this, but it has suffered budget cuts, has lost many of its brightest minds and was slow to sound a global alarm on Ebola. Not until Aug. 8, 4 1 ⁄ 2 months into the epidemic, did the organization declare a global emergency. Its Africa office, which oversees the region, initially did not welcome a robust role by the CDC in the response to the outbreak.

REUTERS                         Oct 3. 2014

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Nurses, the frontline care providers in U.S. hospitals, say they are untrained and unprepared to handle patients arriving in their hospital emergency departments infected with Ebola.

Many say they have gone to hospital managers, seeking training on how to best care for patients and protect themselves and their families from contracting the deadly disease....

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly said that U.S. hospitals are prepared to handle such patients. Many infectious disease experts agree with that assessment.

... Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas that is now caring for the first Ebola patient to be diagnosed in this country had completed Ebola training just before Thomas Eric Duncan arrived in their emergency department on Sept. 26. But despite being told that Duncan had recently traveled from Liberia, hospital staff failed to recognize the Ebola risk and sent him home, where he spent another two days becoming sicker and more infectious.

NEW YORK TIMES                 OCT. 5 2014

by MANNY FERNANDEZ and ROBERT PEAR 

But increased attention about the virus has jangled nerves around the country, particularly among West African immigrant communities and recent travelers to that region, and placed health care workers on a kind of high alert. “We expect that we will see more rumors, or concerns, or possibilities of cases,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the federal C.D.C., said Saturday. “Until there is a positive laboratory test, that is what they are — rumors and concerns.”

...

NEW YORK TIMES          Oct. 3, 2014

DALLAS TEX.      

On Thursday, the hospital, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, released a statement essentially blaming a flaw in its electronic health records system for its decision to send the patient — Thomas E. Duncan, a Liberian national visiting his girlfriend and relatives in the United States — home the first time he visited its emergency room, Sept. 25. It said there were separate “workflows” for doctors and nurses in the records so the doctors did not receive the information that he had come from Africa.

But on Friday evening, the hospital effectively retracted that portion of its statement, saying that “there was no flaw” in its electronic health records system. The hospital said “the patient’s travel history was documented and available to the full care team in the electronic health record (E.H.R.), including within the physician’s workflow.”

UPDATE with comments from interviw with CDC Director Tom Frieden.   Scroll below.

huffingtonpost.com - October 2nd, 2014 - Jeffery Young

The world has known about Ebola for almost 40 years, yet there's no cure or vaccine on the market.

That could change amid worldwide attention to the ongoing outbreak of the virus in West Africa, which has claimed more than 3,000 lives already, and the first diagnosis of a patient with the disease in the United States. But not for a few more years -- at least.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Update: Comments by CDC Director on Sunday TV interview

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/cdc-director-tom-frieden-ebola-drug-pipeline-will-be-slow-n218666

cnn.com - October 1, 2014

CNN's Jake Tapper speaks to Gavin Macgregor-Skinner and Jeffery Stern. With the first Ebola diagnosis in the U.S., is the country prepared to handle a potential outbreak?

http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2014/10/01/only-four-u-s-hospitals-prepared-for-outbreak/

                                   CLICK ON THE IMAGES BELOW - TO ENLARGE (2 page .PDF file)

http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/pdf/ppe-poster.pdf

http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/resources/factsheets.html

BBC            October 3, 2014

A hospital in the German city of Frankfurt-on-Main has taken in an Ebola patient after he was flown in during the night under tight security.

He is a Ugandan doctor who worked with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone. After arriving on a medical flight, the man was brought to Frankfurt University Hospital where he was placed in an isolation ward.

It is Germany's second case, with a man undergoing treatment in Hamburg after arriving from West Africa in August.

The Frankfurt hospital said the patient's arrival had gone well.

Hesse Minister of Social Affairs Stefan Gruettner said the patient had been working for an Italian aid organisation in Sierra Leone and had helped Ebola sufferers there before becoming infected himself.

Full Story
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29473623

Medical staff in protective equipment attend the arrival of the Ebola patient at Frankfurt University Hospital

NEW YORK TIMES              October 3, 2014

MONROVIA, Liberia — The arrival in the United States of a Liberian man infected with the Ebola virus shows how difficult it is to control or restrict the disease from spreading, and how porous current procedures are in a world of globalized air travel.

Liberian officials said on Thursday that they planned to prosecute the passenger, Thomas E. Duncan, for lying on an airport questionnaire about not having contact with a person infected with Ebola before his travel — a pivotal part of the country’s screening process.

Mr. Duncan took three planes as he flew from Monrovia, the Liberian capital, to Dallas last month, connecting in Brussels and Washington.

19 September 2014 - BBC News

Hundreds of foreign aid workers are in West Africa treating people with Ebola. One of them is Cokie van der Velde who has just flown from the UK to Liberia. She explains why she has left the safety of her home to face the deadly virus.

I was first in Liberia five weeks ago and I believe the situation is now much worse. Back then, our treatment centres had already run out of room and we were starting to put people in corridors.

In the centre, people groan and cry out - the smell of blood, diarrhoea and vomit is awful - unfortunately there is also a very pervading smell of dead bodies.

I can only leave it to your imagination to understand what a pile of bodies smells like after a week in very hot, moist surroundings - it makes you feel sick quite a lot of the time.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29245149

By Rebecca Smith - 22 Sep 2014 - telegraph.co.uk

By Helen Branswell - The Canadian Press - Sep 21, 2014

Winnipeg is half a world away from the countries in Africa where Ebola, and its viral cousin, Marburg, occasionally slip out of their animal reservoir to start infecting and killing people, as Ebola is now doing in West Africa.

The current outbreak has infected at least 5,335 people and killed at least 2,622. To date, there has never been a case of either viral hemorrhagic fever infections within Canadian borders.

So why then is Canada's national lab an Ebola research powerhouse? Why is a facility on the edge of the Prairies, near North America's longitudinal centre, the site from whence some of the most promising Ebola research emanates?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/how-a-winnipeg-lab-became-an-ebola-research-powerhouse-1.2773397

rt.com - Sep 22, 2014

While the world is preoccupied with Islamic State or political games around Ukraine, there’s another threat emerging from the West Africa - where people are dying by hundreds, reaped by the deadliest Ebola epidemic to be ever known to mankind. Efforts to contain it end in a failure, and the vaccine is nonexistent yet. Are we seeing another pandemic slowly growing up to strike at mankind? What should be done to stop it? What does it mean to be a doctor in a place where death reigns? We try to find out this together with the head of the Médecins Sans Frontières - Doctors Without Borders. Dr. Joanne Liu is on Sophie&Co today.

http://rt.com/shows/sophieco/189516-west-africa-ebola-threat/

By Zoe Chace - Sep 22, 2014 - npr.org

The response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was massive: Billions of dollars in donations poured in.

"It had everything," says Joel Charny, who works with InterAction, a group that coordinates disaster relief. "It had this element of being an act of God in one of the poorest countries on the planet that's very close to the United States. ... And the global public just mobilized tremendously."

People haven't responded to the Ebola outbreak in the same way; it just hasn't led to that kind of philanthropic response.

From the point of view of philanthropy, the Ebola outbreak is the opposite of the Haiti earthquake. It's far from the U.S. It's hard to understand. The outbreak emerged over a period of months — not in one dramatic moment — and it wasn't initially clear how bad it was.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/09/22/349962559/why-raising-money-to-fight-ebola-is-hard