Global Health

Image: A masked man walks past trees shrouded with pollution haze in Beijing, China. Andy Wong/AP

npr.org - September 16th, 2015 - Susan Brink

More people die prematurely because of the air they breathe than the 2.8 million who die each year of HIV/AIDS and malaria combined.

That's the startling statistic from a new study in this week's journal Nature. The annual global death toll from outdoor air pollution is 3.3 million. (Premature death is a medical term that means a usually preventable death that occurs before expected — for instance, earlier than the life expectancy of age 78 in the U.S.).

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USA TODAY by Bart Jansen                           Sept. 19, 2015

WASHINGTON – Federal authorities will end mandatory Ebola screening Monday for travelers from Liberia to five U.S. airports, but will continue to scrutinize travelers from Sierra Leone and Guinea, federal officials announced Friday.

The Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection had provided extra screening for more than 30,000 travelers during the past year, after an outbreak of the often fatal disease in West Africa.....

Customs and Border Protection and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agreed to remove Liberia from the list of countries subject to enhanced visa and port-of-entry screening, effective Monday....

The U.S. will maintain extra screening for travelers from Sierra Leone and Guinea, which still see a handful of new cases each week, and for people who traveled through those countries during the previous three weeks.

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/09/18/ebola-travel-airport-screening-liberia-sierra-leone-guinea-customs-border-protection/72398942/

REUTERS    Sept.14, 2015
FREETOWN — Health authorities quarantined hundreds of people in northern Sierra Leone on Monday after a 16-year-old girl died of Ebola in an apparent case of sexual transmission, the first confirmed death from the virus in the district for nearly six months.

Sierra Leone celebrated last month when it discharged the last remaining Ebola patient from its treatment centers. But since then a new spate of cases has erupted, leaving two dead and five people in treatment.

The teenage girl, Kadiatu Thullah, died on Sunday at the International Medical Corps Ebola treatment unit, authorities said.

Emmanuel Conteh, head of the Ebola Response Centre for the district of Bombali in northern Sierra Leone, said that some 690 people in the village of Robuya where Kadiatu lived would be isolated for three weeks....it.

Conteh said health workers were investigating how the teenager got infected, since she had not traveled outside the village in years. Initial suspicions are that she had sex with an Ebola survivor.

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http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nation-and-world/quarantines-return-ebola-makes-comeback-sierra-leone

THE LANCET by Richard Horton                         Sept. 12, 2015

LONDON-- Post-Ebola reverie has given birth to a plethora of expert panels to consider what went wrong. The latest parade of global health specialists appointed to learn lessons gathered at the Wellcome Trust in London last week.
 Under the auspices of the US Institute of Medicine (IOM), a Commission to “deliberate and evaluate options to strengthen global, regional, and local systems to better prepare, detect, and respond to epidemic diseases” spent 2 days amassing evidence.

 There was no shortage of experience brought to bear on these important matters. Here were Margaret Chan, Jeremy Farrar, Ilona Kickbusch, David Heymann, Larry Gostin, Joy Phumaphi, Joanne Liu, and Peter Piot all wrestling with a seemingly intractable challenge. The statements offered to the Commission were arresting. But  the purpose of the meeting was not to talk. It was to identify the best system for an epidemic response....
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http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2900152-X/fulltext