Sierra Leone

  A company with a swarm of genetically modified mosquitoes wants   the Food and Drug Administrationto grant emergency approval for   the controversial insects' use in the fight against the Zika virus.

 Oxitec changed the DNA of the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that    spread the virus so their offspring die before adulthood, Hadyn  Parry, the British company's CEO, told the House of    Representatives' Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in Washington on Wednesday. The company deploys only male mosquitoes, which cannot bite, to halt transmission of the disease, he added.

"I don’t think time is on our side with Zika," Parry said.

Resilience is one of those buzzwords that every so often captures the hearts and minds of development practitioners. The importance of this particular term, though, becomes all too clear as the world faces an increasing number of humanitarian crises, including outbreaks that can turn into pandemics.

On Saturday, the World Bank Group officially launched its much anticipated Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility — a financing mechanism designed to quickly mobilize funds to tackle global disease outbreaks and create a new insurance market for pandemic risk. Questions linger about how effective the new mechanism will be, how much money it can leverage, and whether it can stand the test of time against pandemics that are growing more frequent and more costly.

The international community struggled to effectively mobilize funds to bring an end to the Ebola virus outbreak that ravaged West Africa in 2014, killing thousands. The latest global health emergency to grip the world’s attention — the Zika virus — is highlighting again just how ill-prepared the international community is to fund cross-border outbreak response. Three months after the U.S. White House requested $1.9 billion for Zika, the U.S. Congress is still arguing over the sum.

Introduction: The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa raised many questions about the control of infectious disease in an increasingly connected global society. Limited availability of contact information made contact tracing diffcult or impractical in combating the outbreak. 

Methods: We consider the development of multi-scale public health strategies that act on individual and community levels. We simulate policies for community-level response aimed at early screening all members of a community, as well as travel restrictions to prevent inter-community transmission.