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A Doctors Without Borders staffer supervises as construction workers complete the new Ebola treatment center on August 17, 2014 near Monrovia, Liberia.  John Moore—Getty Images

doctorswithoutborders.org - August 18, 2014

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) admitted nine patients today into its newly constructed ELWA 3 Ebola Management Center in Monrovia, Liberia, beginning a process of scaling up operations at the 120-bed facility.

An Ebola outbreak continues to rage virtually unchecked in this city of approximately one million people, far exceeding the capacity of the few medical facilities accepting Ebola patients. Much of the city’s health system has shut down over fears of Ebola among staff members and patients, leaving many people without treatment for other conditions.

Ute, a CDC laboratory specialist, works on viruses like Ebola.

cdc.gov - August 18, 2014

The Most Important Test in West Africa

When a person in West Africa suddenly has a fever, how do you know whether it’s Ebola or something else?  When an Ebola patient gets better, how do you know when that person is no longer infectious to others?

To get answers to both questions, you need a laboratory equipped with state of the art equipment. To get those urgently needed answers quickly, that lab ideally would be located close to an Ebola treatment center.

It sounds difficult to build such a safe, sophisticated lab in a major city – and seems nearly impossible in the remote parts of Africa where Ebola outbreaks occur – but CDC has done it for other outbreaks and is doing it now in West Africa.  CDC mobile labs equipped with real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) equipment already are being set up next to West African Ebola treatment centers.

And Ute, a CDC expert, heads up the teams going with them.  When she’s not traveling to remote regions of the world, she’s at CDC headquarters in Atlanta working to speed diagnosis of the world’s worst viruses.

By Jonathan Paye-Layleh, Associated Press AUGUST 17, 2014

Liberian officials fear Ebola could soon spread through the capital's largest slum after residents raided a quarantine center for suspected patients and took items including bloody sheets and mattresses.

I have been proposing that, rather than trying to foresee the future, we consider accepting and conducting further research on a much more fundamental, all-encompassing and long-term-resilient approach to our built environment.  I have been proposing that such an elemental approach should be structural adaptivity.  I believe that our world must and will give maximum adaptivity to the basic elements of our built environment to adjust to and meet our needs for the unpredictable, rapidly changing world over the next 50-100 years. 

In working on this, I conducted an Exercise.  I experimented with a number of different future conditions, or scenarios, that I think are quite possible.  The first two that drew my strongest concern were the conflicting scenarios of: (1) how planners might address our urban areas after global warming has abated – and the problem is continuous hot weather and more storms – as opposed to (2) how planners are now addressing the need to stop or slow down global warming.  I also experimented with additional scenarios that I do not think we are able to, presently, forecast accurately.  Most of them, however, I believe will surface eventually, in one way or another, and cause huge problems.