Sierra Leone

Survivors of the Ebola virus pose for a picture outside a clinic near Tubmanburg, October 15, 2014.
REUTERS/James Giahyue

CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - To hasten Ebola containment, mobilize survivors

uk.reuters.com - by Magdalena Mis - December 10, 2014

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Thousands of Ebola survivors with little to no risk of re-infection are critical to controlling the epidemic and training them has the potential to save thousands of lives and decrease the spread of the virus, experts said on Wednesday.

Survivors have developed immunity and are effectively the only people in the world protected from the virus, which could allow them to care for the sick without risking their lives, said experts in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

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REUTERS                                                                                                                       Dec. 15, 2014

GENEVA –  The failure of Sierra Leone's strategy for fighting Ebola may be down to a missing ingredient: a big shock that could change people's behavior and finally prevent further infection.

Bruce Aylward, the head of Ebola response at the World Health Organization, said Sierra Leone was well placed to contain the disease -- its worst outbreak on record -- with infrastructure, organization and aid.

Health workers spray themselves with chlorine disinfectants after removing the body a woman who died of Ebola virus in the Aberdeen district of Freetown, Sierra Leone. (REUTERS/Josephus Olu-Mammah)

The problem is that its people have yet to be shocked out of behavior that is helping the disease to spread, still keeping infected loved ones close and touching the bodies of the dead.

"Every new place that gets infected goes through that same terrible learning curve where a lot of people have to die ... before those behaviors start to change," Aylward told Reuters.

NBC NEWS      by  Maggie Fox                                                                                               Dec. 15, 2014
In especially deadly outbreak of Ebola burned unseen in a remote part of Sierra Leone for several weeks, giving public health experts a reality check. It's also a perfect embodiment of the warning that they've been giving for months: that a single spark can set off a conflagration of disease and death.

It happened in Kono, a remote district bordering Guinea. World Health Organization workers heard rumors of deaths and traveled there to find scenes out of a horror movie. At least 87 people had died and been hastily buried, often without the precautions needed to stop the corpses from infecting the living....

What happened in Kono illustrates just how fragile any success is.

It's likely that just one person carried the virus there from an affected area, and without precautions in place, it spread like wildfire.

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BLOOMBERG by Chris Jasper and Simeon Bennett                                                                          Dec. 15, 2014

The number of airline seats on offer between Liberia, the African nation with the most deaths from the Ebola outbreak, and the outside world has dropped 81 percent in the past year, according to official capacity figures.

Seat availability to Sierra Leone will be 75 percent lower in January than it was a year earlier, while the total for Guinea will be down 39 percent, flight scheduling database provider OAG said today in a report.

Kenyan health officials prepare to receive arriving passengers at an observation area at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi on Oct. 28. The number of flights in the Ebola zone has plummeted after outside carriers scrapped services in response to the spread of the disease... Photographer:Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty Images