Situation Report

Two months into a strike, Haiti's five public hospitals stand near-deserted, unable to provide emergency services (AFP Photo/Hector Retamal)

AFP - yahoo.com - by Amalie Baron - May 18, 2016

When a pregnant woman died outside one of Haiti's major public hospitals in Port-au-Prince last week, her family and neighbors lashed out in despair and anger.

The expectant mother was an indirect casualty of a two-month strike by doctors no longer willing to tolerate a chronic lack of basic supplies and unsafe work conditions which they say endanger their patients' lives.

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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.

CLICK HERE - WHO confirms Zika virus strain imported from the Americas to Cabo Verde

CLICK HERE - CDC - Zika Virus in Cape Verde

who.int - digitaljournal.com - by AGNÈS PEDRERO (AFP) - May 20, 2016

The Zika virus strain linked to surging cases of neurological disorders and birth defects in Latin America has now been found in Africa, health officials said Friday, as the first fatality on French territory was reported on the Caribbean island of Martinique.

The World Health Organization announced that the strain of Zika circulating in Cape Verde had been shown to be the same as the one behind an explosion of cases in the Americas.

"This is the first time that strain of Zika which has been showed to cause neurological disorders and microcephaly... has been detected in Africa," Matshidiso Moeti, WHO's Africa regional chief, told reporters in Geneva.

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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.