ASSOCIATED PRESS by Clarence Roy-Macaulay                                                             March 18, 2015

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone  — Sierra Leone is planning another three-day, countrywide shutdown later this month to ferret out Ebola cases, remind people how to protect themselves from the disease and control its transmission.

The West Africa Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 10,000 people is declining but the disease has remained stubbornly entrenched in parts of Guinea and Sierra Leone. Liberia, the third country severely affected, currently has no Ebola cases.

In the drive to zero cases in Sierra Leone, the government will again ask residents to stay in their homes for three days, Alfred Palo Conteh, head of the country's National Ebola Response Center, said Wednesday. The shutdown is expected to take place March 27 through 29, according to Patrick Fatoma, another official with the Ebola response center.

The government has done this before, and some experts said it was unexpectedly effective in providing information about to control the disease.

LIVE SCIENCE by Rachel Rattner                                                                                 March 18, 2015

Health officials have made tremendous progress in fighting the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in recent months, but continued efforts are still needed, experts say. That's because the cases that are happening now could be enough to restart the whole epidemic....

Although health officials are trying to trace all of the people who had contact with each Ebola patient, this "contact tracing" is far from perfect in Guinea and Sierra Leone. As a result, cases pop up among people who officials didn't know were at risk. For example, so far this month, just 14 percent of cases in Guinea occurred among people who were known to have had contact with someone who was sick with Ebola, WHO says.

This "shadow epidemic," which is occurring under the radar, is very worrisome, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior associate and infectious disease physician at the Center for Health Security at the University of Pittsburgh.

If this shadow transmission continues, "it will threaten to cause this whole outbreak to reignite again," Adalja said. "You have to make sure you're finding every case, and stopping transmission in every case."

ASSOCIATED PRESS                                March 17, 2015

NEW YORK — Four more American aid workers arrived back in the United States on Tuesday from West Africa to be monitored for Ebola, health officials said.

The latest arrivals bring to 16 the number of aid workers who have returned from Sierra Leone since Friday. None of them have been diagnosed with Ebola, but they will be isolated and monitored during the next three weeks for signs of the disease.

Officials have released few details, citing patient privacy. But all are connected to — or had direct physical contact with — another American who came down with Ebola last week in Africa. The unidentified man is in critical condition at a National Institutes of Health hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.

The other aid workers are staying near the Maryland hospital or hospitals in Atlanta and Omaha with special isolation units — in case they become sick, according to officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Read complete story.
http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/national/2015/03/4_more_aid_workers_flown_back_to_us_for_ebola_monitoring

DEVEX   by Richard Jones                                                         March 17, 2015

(scroll down for link to EU statement.)

As the death toll from Ebola now tops 10,000 in West Africa, donors and aid implementers are figuring out how to best transition from the emergency to the recovery phase of the crisis.

Top EU and U.N. officials, leaders of Ebola-affected nations and representatives from the African Union, nongovernmental organizations, the private sector and the scientific community met in Brussels, Belgium, earlier this month to make progress on this goal. They agreed to embark on the design of a road map to help the economies of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia get back on track, starting with the priority task of rebuilding health systems.

But that, of course, will be no easy feat.

“We are at a really crucial stage of the real fight against Ebola, because this is a turning point when the emergency stage or the emergency response or medical response to Ebola containment is now turning into coordinating and structuring the long-term recovery program,” European Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development Neven Mimica said in an exclusive interview with Devex at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels.