Situation Report

massgeneral.org - August 27, 2015

While most primary care physicians responding to a survey taken in late 2014 and early 2015 expressed confidence in their ability to identify potential cases of Ebola and communicate Ebola risks to their patients, only 50 to 70 percent of them gave answers that fit with CDC guidelines when asked how they would care for hypothetical patients who might have been exposed to Ebola. In addition, those who were least likely to encounter an Ebola patient – based on their location and characteristics of their patients – were most likely to choose overly intense management of patients actually at low risk.  The results of the survey, conducted by a team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators, have been published online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

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CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - Ebola Risk and Preparedness: A National Survey of Internists 

Source:Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) - Date Published:08/20/2015

Annotation:This 38-page document provides a standard format for creating an Ebola Concept of Operations (ConOps) plan at the state, territorial, or major metropolitan area government level. It provides information on measures local governments, agencies, and organizations can take to support the plan. The ConOps in the template describes strategic, high-level considerations for establishing a regional tiered system to safely and effectively manage persons under investigation (PUIs) or patients confirmed with Ebola.

(38 page .PDF document)
URL: http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/documents/ebola-concept-of-operations-planning-template-8-20-2015.pdf

Authors:Dugas, Robert; Lamoureux, Joe; Mangieri, William; et al.
Type:Guideline/Assessment Tool
ID:11129. From Disaster LitTM, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

http://disasterlit.nlm.nih.gov/record/11129

BARAA AL-HALABI via Getty Images

There were challenges due to conflict, insecurity and deliberate obstructions.

huffingtonpost.com - AP - by Edith M. Lederer - August 26, 2015

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon accused all parties in the Syrian conflict of "indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks" on civilians and said the U.N. and its partners couldn't deliver food to 422,000 people in besieged areas in July.

Ban said in his monthly report to the U.N. Security Council circulated Tuesday that access to the 4.6 million Syrians in hard-to-reach areas - most controlled by Islamic State extremists - remains a critical concern with extremely limited humanitarian access.

He said U.N. agencies and their partners reached only 29 of the 127 hard-to-reach locations last month, and in the besieged areas, the only aid that arrived was a trickle of health assistance to 1.8 percent of the population.

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Ebolavirus, animal - Uganda: porcine, epidemiological assessment

CLICK HERE - Assessing the Potential Role of Pigs in the Epidemiology of Ebola Virus in Uganda

promedmail.org - September 2, 2015

Summary

Uganda has experienced 4 Ebola outbreaks since the discovery of the virus. Recent epidemiological work has shown pigs are hosts for ebolaviruses. Due to their high reproduction rates, rapid weight gain, potential to provide quick financial returns, and rising demand for pork, pig production in Uganda has undergone massive expansion. The combination of pork sector growth supported by development programmes and Ebola virus risk prompted a foresight exercise using desk, interview, and spatial methods. The study found that the lack of serological evidence for specific reservoir species, the number of human index cases unable to account for their source of infection, domestic pig habitat overlap with potential Ebola virus zoonotic host environments, reported interactions at the human-pig-wildlife interface that could support transmission, fever in pigs as a commonly reported problem by pig farmers, and temporal correlation of outbreaks with peak pork consumption periods, warrants further research into potential zoonotic transmission in Uganda from pigs.