Situation Report

POLITICO by Joseph Lamin Kamara                                                               June 11, 2015

The outbreak of the Ebola virus disease has had enormous impacts on Sierra Leone’s education. Whether one views the country’s immediate pre-Ebola educational system as a failure or as a success, the outbreak has exacerbated that failure or posed a setback to the success. Nevertheless, education in the country has seen more challenges than successes.

Since late 1960s, Sierra Leone has seen several political instabilities which have eventually pretermitted much of the success the country made earlier in education. Coup d’états, scramble for diamonds and a long violent civil conflict are mostly responsible for the country’s descent from being the ‘Athens of West Africa’ to performing consistently abysmally in public examinations....

Problems relating to payment of teachers’ and lecturers’ salaries, shortage of teachers, infrastructural incapacities, among others, have also been at the heart of Sierra Leone’s educational problems.

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http://politicosl.com/2015/06/how-the-ebola-outbreak-has-impacted-sierra-leone%E2%80%99s-education/

NBC NEWS   by Magie Fox                          June 10, 2015

The steady decline in Ebolacases has stopped and the numbers are ticking up again in Guinea and Sierra Leone, the World Health Organization reported Wednesday.

WHO is worried that there are still people who don't understand how to stop the spread of the virus, which has infected more than 27,000 people and killed more than 11,000 of them in the West African epidemic. Even more worrying, it's not entirely clear where some of the new cases have come from....

If health workers can find out where and how people were infected, they can track down and check everyone who might have been in close contact and night transmit the disease. But there are still mysterious outbreaks.

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http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/ebola-ticks-again-west-africa-n373171

AFP                                                                                                June 10, 2015

Rome -- An Italian nurse who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone with medical charity Emergency has been cured and left hospital on Wednesday, the health ministry announced.

Stefano Marongiu, a male nurse from Sardinia, has spent the last month receiving treatment at the Spallanzani infectious diseases clinic in Rome.

He was the second Italian to contract the disease after Fabrizio Pulvirenti, a Sicilian doctor who had also worked for Emergency in Sierra Leone.

The doctor, who left hospital in January, was treated at the same clinic with a combination of experimental drugs and the blood plasma of an Ebola survivor.

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http://news.yahoo.com/italian-nurse-cured-ebola-130902382.html

BBC by Anne Soy                                                              June 9, 2015
The UN's emergency Ebola response headquarters in Ghana's capital, Accra, is to close as the outbreak slows.

The head of the mission, Peter Graaff, met the Ghanaian president to thank the country for hosting the agency since it was set up in September last year.

A small team will stay until the end of June to co-ordinate air operations, the agency, known as Unmeer, said.

Ghana has not been affected by the epidemic in West Africa, which has killed more than 11,000 people.

The BBC's Africa health correspondent Anne Soy says the mission set up its headquarters in Accra as it was far enough away from the affected countries, where there was logistical lockdown, but close enough the epicentre of the outbreak.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-33063900