Africa

REUTERS by Kate Keller and Ben Hirschler                                      June 17, 2015

LONDON --Drugmakers' plans to conduct vast clinical trials to test and hopefully validate the first Ebola vaccines have been thwarted by success in beating back the deadly epidemic in West Africa.

GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Johnson & Johnson are struggling to recruit volunteers with enough exposure to the disease to prove whether their vaccines are doing the job and preventing infection.

The story might have been very different with just another three or four months of disease spread, underscoring the need to act more quickly to develop vaccines for emerging diseases....

Guinea, where Ebola is still infecting new victims, as "the only hope" for showing efficacy, according to Kieny and to Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Britain's Oxford University.

The WHO is overseeing the so-called ring vaccination study in Guinea in which close contacts and family around each new case of Ebola are vaccinated -- either immediately or after a three-week delay -- to see if the shot offers protection.

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The latest Ebola crisis may yield clues about where it hides between outbreaks.

GLOBAL LITERACY PROJECT                                       June  15, 2015
abstract of article in
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC  by  David Quammen   
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   Picture of a masked bush meat hunter. Peter Muller.

EUREAKALERT!                                                  June 15, 2015
(Scroll down for link to PLOS One article.)

ARISONA STATE UNIVERSITY --

Using Twitter and Google search trend data in the wake of the very limited U.S. Ebola outbreak of October 2014, a team of researchers from Arizona State University, Purdue University and Oregon State University have found that news media is extraordinarily effective in creating public panic.

Because only five people were ultimately infected yet Ebola dominated the U.S. media in the weeks after the first imported case, the researchers set out to determine mass media's impact on people's behavior on social media.

"Social media data have been suggested as a way to track the spread of a disease in a population, but there is a problem that in an emerging outbreak people also use social media to express concern about the situation," explains study team leader Sherry Towers of ASU's Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center. "It is hard to separate the two effects in a real outbreak situation...."

Towers states that this study will be useful in future outbreak situations because it provides valuable insight into just how strongly news media can manipulate public emotions on a topic.

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A Sierra Leonean doctor practises wearing protective clothing in the Ebola Training Academy in Freetown, Sierra Leone, December 16, 2014.  Reuters/Baz Ratner

AFP - June 13, 2015

Dakar (AFP) - Health authorities are repeating the mistakes of the past in combatting Ebola, more than a year after its onset in Guinea and Sierra Leone, the international president of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned.

Joanne Liu's remarks on Saturday come a day after Sierra Leone imposed a three-week daytime curfew in the last Ebola-hit areas in a bid to curb a resurgence of the deadly virus, which has killed about 3,900 people in the country.

Neighbouring Liberia was declared Ebola-free in May, but hopes that Sierra Leone and Guinea would quickly follow suit have been dashed in recent weeks.

"We are still making the same mistakes as we did in the past," said Liu.

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