Africa Resilience Initiative

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO by Ofeibea Quist-Arcton        Dec. 25, 2014

MONROVIA -- Working with UNICEF and another nonprofit, Talking Drum, in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, the government aims to provide lessons to children across the country, hit by the Ebola outbreak. Most schools closed this past summer and will likely remain closed for months....

                            Florence Allen Jones, right, is part of the education ministry's classes-by-radio team.

The radio classes are broadcast on local stations, and on United Nations radio. The Education Ministry acknowledged that the broadcasts are not reaching nationwide. In any case, few children in Liberia's 15 counties have access to a radio, or even the batteries to power one. Wealthy parents have hired home tutors for their kids, but many other youngsters have taken to peddling petty goods, like trinkets or donuts, on the streets of Monrovia, to try to earn a little money for their families while schools are closed.

Editorial urging U.S. academic medical centers to do more to fight Ebola
in West Africa

NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE                            Dec. 24, 2014
By Jeffrey M. Drazen, M.D., Edward W. Campion, M.D., Eric J. Rubin. M.D., Ph.D., Stephen Morrissey, Ph.D., and Lindsey R. Baden, M.D.

... As the Ebola outbreak has burned its way deep into Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, in one of the worst acute public health crises in 50 years, our academic medical centers have sat largely on the sidelines.

...The leaders of academic medical centers that have put roadblocks in the path of those wishing to serve need to rethink their priorities. They should be making it easier, not harder, for altruistic physicians, nurses, and other health care providers to help care for the sick and control the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. ... Something is wrong when some of the greatest health care centers in the world are not helping in the fight against this disastrously dangerous threat to human health. We ask the leaders of every medical center in the country to figure out how to make it possible for their staff, and even qualified trainees, to help on the ground in West Africa.

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REUTERS                                                              Dec. 24, 2014

ACCRA—Medical detective work will be the next big phase in the fight against Ebola when the United Nations deploys hundreds of health workers to identify chains of infection as the virus passes from person to person, top U.N. health workers said.
Health workers bury the body of a suspected Ebola victim at a cemetery in Freetown, Dec. 21, 2014.

The health teams will travel to each district and region of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the three countries at the center of the epidemic, to trace who each infected person has potentially contacted.

The effort will run in parallel with measures to minimize the spread of infection, such as treating all Ebola patients in specialized centers and burying all victims safely.

But Phase Two of the plan is to contain the virus by understanding its lines of transmission, said World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan.

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THE WASHINGTON POST  by Lena H. Sun and Joel Achenbach       Dec. 24, 2014

One scientist may have been exposed to the Ebola virus and as many as a dozen others are being assessed for potential exposure at a lab of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, agency officials said Wednesday.

Experiments with deadly viruses such as Ebola have to be performed in biosafety level or BSL-4 laboratories, for the highest level on containment. (Tim Brakemeier/AFP/Getty Images)

The potential exposure took place Monday when scientists conducting research on the virus at a high-security lab mistakenly put a sample containing the potentially infectious virus in a place where it was transferred for processing to another CDC lab, also in Atlanta on the CDC campus.

The technician has no symptoms of illness and is being monitored for 21 days. Agency spokeswoman Barbara Reynolds said others who entered the lab have been contacted and will be assessed for possible exposure by CDC clinicians. She said the number of exposures could be much less than a dozen.