Global Health

UPDATE

CONGRESSIONAL HEARING ON EBOLA: STORIES  AND LINK TO TESTIMONY BEFORE A HOUSE  ENERGY AND COMMERCE SUBCOMMITTEE   (scroll down)

By Will Duham

(Reuters) - Congressional lawmakers criticized the government's response to Ebola in the United States on Thursday as some called, at a congressional hearing probing efforts to contain the virus, for a ban on travel from epidemic-stricken West Africa.

Federal Aviation Administration chief Michael Huerta told reporters separately that the United States is assessing whether to issue a travel ban "on a day-to-day basis" but that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had determined that a ban would not address the challenges posed by Ebola.

...Several schools in Ohio and Texas were closed after concerns that a nurse with Ebola traveled on a plane with people with ties to the schools.

AFP                                                    Oct. 16, 2014

WASHINGTON - An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo this year came from a different source than the epidemic raging across West Africa, scientists said Wednesday.

Even though the two deadly Ebola outbreaks have separate animal origins, the report in the New England Journal of Medicine nevertheless raises concern about the emergence of the often fatal hemorrhagic fever across the African continent.

A Congolese barber  cuts hair in Lokolia, on October 6, 2014, despite the authorities' order to avoid physical contact to stop the spread of Ebola (AFP Photo/Kathy Katayi)

Ebola was first identified in 1976, and had returned in waves. The latest outbreak in West Africa is history's largest, killing more than 4,400 people since the beginning of the year.

A separate, smaller outbreak in the DRC began over the summer, and has killed 49 people of the 69 believed infected between late July and October 7, the NEJM report said.

An analysis of the virus's genome showed that it is a type called Ebola Zaire, and is 99.2 percent related to a 1995 variant that emerged in Kikwit in the DRC.

NEW YORK TIMES                                                                  Oct 15, 2014
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

A dummy depicting an Ebola patient was part of a C.D.C. training session for health care workers Wednesday in Anniston, Ala. Credit Erik S. Lesser/European Pressphoto Agency

REUTERS                                                          Wed Oct 15, 2014 5:10pm EDT

Chances that other passengers on the plane were infected were very low, but the nurse should not have been traveling on the flight, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Thomas Frieden told reporters.

The woman, Amber Vinson, 29, was isolated immediately after reporting a fever on Tuesday, Texas Department of State Health Services officials said. She had treated Liberian patient Thomas Eric Duncan, who died of Ebola and was the first patient diagnosed with the virus in the United States.

Vinson, a worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, had taken a Frontier Airlines flight from Cleveland, Ohio to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport on Monday, officials said.