Situation Report

South Sudanese patients wait for medical treatment in the outpatient department of a medical camp.
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Oxfam’s water and sanitation coordinator writes about the challenges of bringing South Sudan’s cholera outbreak under control

theguardian.com - by Katrice King - August 6, 2015

“I have no money to continue buying water. I will have to beg from those at the borehole or from the water trucks. Or else, I go back to the village,” a mother of five told me recently. . . .

. . . This is the agonising reality of families I have met in parts of Juba; they are struggling to cope with a worsening water crisis fuelled by the deteriorating economic situation in South Sudan. As a result, the city is now left exposed to the spread of deadly diseases.

Cholera has already claimed 42 lives since May – including seven children – and has infected more than 1,400 people. . . .

. . . If the water shortages continue, hygiene conditions in the most affected areas will worsen and people will have no alternative but to use unprotected sources such as rivers and open wells, exposing more people to cholera.

ASSOCIATED PRESS by Clarence Roy-Macaulay                                                  Aug. 3, 2015

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone  — Sierra Leone is in a stronger place than it was six months ago to fight Ebola, but the new challenge is to get to zero cases, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday during a visit, as new cases emerged in the city and in an area that had not seen the deadly virus for months.

Two new cases of Ebola surfaced in Sierra Leone's Northern Tonkolili District after a man died last week. The district had not had a single case of Ebola in five months. The victim contracted the disease in the capital, traveled to his home village, and was treated for a fever at the local hospital but authorities didn't call the Ebola emergency number. He didn't have a burial that followed special procedures required for Ebola victims....

Dr. Thomas Frieden, CDC director, said it was important that the case was identified and not missed, and he was impressed with the speed of the response.

"The challenge now is to get to zero cases and that is not going to be easy," he said. "Authorities must not let down their guard. The country should keep its guard up."

huffingtonpost.com - by Dr. James Hansen - July 27, 2015

. . . 2°C global warming, rather than being a safe "guardrail," is highly dangerous. . . .

. . . My conclusion, based on the total information available, is that continued high emissions would result in multi-meter sea level rise this century and lock in continued ice sheet disintegration such that building cities or rebuilding cities on coast lines would become foolish. . . .

. . . A startling conclusion of our paper is that effects of freshwater release onto the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic are already underway and 1-2 decades sooner in the real world than in the model (Fig. 2). 

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CLICK HERE - Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics - Earth's energy imbalance and implications

CLICK HERE - Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence from Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that 2°C Global Warming is Highly Dangerous

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On March 23, 2015, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) together with the World Health Organization started a clinical trial in Guinea to test the safety, efficacy and capacity substance to provoke an immune response of the anti-Ebola vaccine rVSV-EBOV.

cnn.com - by Laura Smith-Spark - July 31, 2015

(CNN) A newly developed vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus is "highly effective" and could help prevent its spread in the current and future outbreaks, the World Health Organization said Friday.

Trials of the single-dose VSV-EBOV vaccine began in March in Guinea -- one of three West African nations at the center of the outbreak -- and have shown such promise that this week it was decided to extend immediate vaccination to "all people at risk" after close contact with an infected person, a WHO news release said.

"This is an extremely promising development," said Dr. Margaret Chan, the body's director general.

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