Africa Resilience Initiative

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Sat, 2009-03-21 11:57 — mdmcdonald

The mission of this working group is to articulate and shape issues of resilience and sustainability on the continent of Africa as they may be implemented as reforms of current policies, as well as contemplate and make recommendations for more extensive critiques and proposals for national, provincial, and local systems transformation, as may be necessary or desirable beyond the scope of traditional reforms being undertaken by the current African national governments and local government proposals in Africa.

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This working group is focused on developing an Africa Resilience Initiative to ensure resilience and sustainability for all Africans.

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Aboubacar Conte	admin	Anthony	bnorton	Carrielaj	Chisina Kapungu
ChrisAllen	craig.sevcik	Dr Ojia Adamolekun	efrost	Elhadj Drame	Grace Kim
Hadiatou Balde	jranck	Kathy Gilbeaux	mdmcdonald	MDMcDonald_me_com	mike kraft
njchapman	Norea	SmShako	TacarraB	Tjivekumba Kandjii

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Ebola Returns to Sierra Leone Capital After Weeks of No New Cases

Tue, 2015-06-23 09:36 — Kathy Gilbeaux

Health workers put on protective gear before entering a quarantine zone at a Red Cross facility in the town of Koidu, Kono district in Eastern Sierra Leone December 19, 2014. REUTERS/BAZ RATNER

Cases found in a densely populated slum

time.com - Alexandra Sifferlin - June 22, 2015

Two new cases of the deadly Ebola virus have been recorded in Sierra Leone’s capital city of Freetown, about three weeks after the most recent new cases were found, underscoring the difficulty of ridding the region of the disease.

“This is worrisome because we had already closed all Ebola quarantine structures in Freetown since we had gone for weeks without a case,” Sidi Yahya Tunis, a spokesman for the National Ebola Response Centre (NERC) told Reuters. The cases were found in a densely populated slum called Magazine.

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(ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE)

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Malaria morbidity and mortality in Ebola-affected countries caused by decreased health-care capacity, and the potential effect of mitigation strategies: a modelling analysis

Mon, 2015-06-22 16:27 — mike kraft

LANCET by Patrick G. T. Walker and others Volume 15, No. 7, p825–832, July 2015
The ongoing Ebola epidemic in parts of west Africa largely overwhelmed health-care systems in 2014, making adequate care for malaria impossible and threatening the gains in malaria control achieved over the past decade. We quantified this additional indirect burden of Ebola virus disease.

We estimated the number of cases and deaths from malaria in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone from Demographic and Health Surveys data for malaria prevalence and coverage of malaria interventions before the Ebola outbreak. We then removed the effect of treatment and hospital care to estimate additional cases and deaths from malaria caused by reduced health-care capacity and potential disruption of delivery of insecticide-treated bednets. We modelled the potential effect of emergency mass drug administration in affected areas on malaria cases and health-care demand....

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Ebola vaccines in limbo expose need for more speed in trials

Wed, 2015-06-17 09:56 — mike kraft

REUTERS by Kate Keller and Ben Hirschler June 17, 2015

LONDON --Drugmakers' plans to conduct vast clinical trials to test and hopefully validate the first Ebola vaccines have been thwarted by success in beating back the deadly epidemic in West Africa.

GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Johnson & Johnson are struggling to recruit volunteers with enough exposure to the disease to prove whether their vaccines are doing the job and preventing infection.

The story might have been very different with just another three or four months of disease spread, underscoring the need to act more quickly to develop vaccines for emerging diseases....

Guinea, where Ebola is still infecting new victims, as "the only hope" for showing efficacy, according to Kieny and to Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Britain's Oxford University.

The WHO is overseeing the so-called ring vaccination study in Guinea in which close contacts and family around each new case of Ebola are vaccinated -- either immediately or after a three-week delay -- to see if the shot offers protection.

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Turn on the taps to defeat the next Ebola

Tue, 2015-06-16 21:07 — mike kraft

IRIN by Jennifer Lazuta June 15, 2015

DAKAR, Senegal - It is a cruel irony that many of the top doctors and nurses in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone will not be around to help rebuild their health systems in the wake of Ebola, having succumbed themselves to the virus.

Many families in Guinea still rely on streams and lakes for their water needs.Photo: Jennifer Lazuta/IRIN

For those that are, the biggest challenges are likely to be electricity, sanitation, and, most of all, water.

“How is it possible to build, or rebuild, as you may call it, a health institution or hospital without [access to] water, which serves as a major catalyst to run the facility?” asked Moses Tamba, a spokesperson for Liberia’s Ministry of Public Works. “It is not possible. You need water....”

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Readability of Ebola Information on Websites of Public Health Agencies, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Europe

Tue, 2015-06-16 12:41 — mike kraft

CDC IED JOURNAL by Enrique Castro-Sánchez , Elpiniki Spanoudakis, and Alison H. Holmes Volume 21, Number 7- July 2015

Public involvement in efforts to control the current Ebola virus disease epidemic requires understandable information. We reviewed the readability of Ebola information from public health agencies in non–Ebola-affected areas. A substantial proportion of citizens would have difficulty understanding existing information, which would potentially hinder effective health-seeking behaviors....

Several factors, including readability of information provided (8), can help reduce health literacy deficits...It is recommended that health information materials should be written at a level typically understandable by an 11-year-old person ... anxiety or panic attributed to a highly virulent infection, such as Ebola, might hinder comprehension of related information (11).

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Health Authorities Repeating Mistakes in Ebola Fight: MSF

Sun, 2015-06-14 21:35 — Kathy Gilbeaux

A Sierra Leonean doctor practises wearing protective clothing in the Ebola Training Academy in Freetown, Sierra Leone, December 16, 2014. Reuters/Baz Ratner

AFP - June 13, 2015

Dakar (AFP) - Health authorities are repeating the mistakes of the past in combatting Ebola, more than a year after its onset in Guinea and Sierra Leone, the international president of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned.

Joanne Liu's remarks on Saturday come a day after Sierra Leone imposed a three-week daytime curfew in the last Ebola-hit areas in a bid to curb a resurgence of the deadly virus, which has killed about 3,900 people in the country.

Neighbouring Liberia was declared Ebola-free in May, but hopes that Sierra Leone and Guinea would quickly follow suit have been dashed in recent weeks.

"We are still making the same mistakes as we did in the past," said Liu.

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Home > Health Sierra Leone Leader Imposes Curfew in Bid to Halt Ebola

Fri, 2015-06-12 16:19 — mike kraft

ASSOCIATED PRESS By CLARENCE ROY-MACAULAY June 12, 2015

FREETOWN -- Sierra Leone's president imposed new restrictions Friday preventing people from entering or leaving two chiefdoms in the northern part of the country that are experiencing a resurgence of Ebola.

While neighboring Liberia has defeated Ebola, Sierra Leone and Guinea have continued to battle new cases, particularly along the border where those two countries meet.

Sierra Leone had 15 news cases in the week ending June 7, according to the World Health Organization, the highest weekly total since late March.

On Friday, President Ernest Bai Koroma said people would be barred from entering or leaving the affected parts of Kambia and Port Loko districts in northern Sierra Leone. A 21-day curfew also will be in effect from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., government officials said, though the public health benefit of such a limited measure was not immediately clear.

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International Ebola Recovery Conference Ending Ebola: “Get to Zero, Stay at Zero and Rebuild”

Thu, 2015-06-11 21:50 — Maeryn Obley

Congo Town, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Photo: Dylan Lowthian/UNDP

Image: Congo Town, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Photo: Dylan Lowthian/UNDP

africa.undp.org - May 9th, 2015

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will host an International Ebola Recovery Conference in July to ensure that the affected countries receive the resources and support they need to overcome the wider socio-economic consequences of the ongoing Ebola outbreak.

The conference at United Nations Headquarters in New York on 10 July 2015 will take place in cooperation with the Governments of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, together with other partners.

With numbers of Ebola cases have dropped, the affected countries still need the support of the international community to get to zero cases, stay there, and to move forward on the road to recovery.

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How Computer Modelers Took On the Ebola Outbreak

Wed, 2015-06-10 09:35 — Kathy Gilbeaux

submitted by Sarah Slaughter

At The Epidemic’s Epicenter: A Liberian child sits in an Ebola isolation ward housing people who might have contracted the contagious disease. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Did real-time epidemic modeling save lives in West Africa?

spectrum.ieee.org - by David Brown - May 28, 2015

. . . “agent-based” models will give a more nuanced picture of how pathogens affect and sicken a population. “This is the wave of the future,” says Stephen Eubank, deputy director of the Virginia Tech lab. “It’s going to take a concerted effort to gather the data and the expertise. But it’s going to happen.”

And so, too, will another Ebola outbreak.

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Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak in Nigeria: Transmission Dynamics and Rapid Control

Sat, 2015-06-06 23:41 — Kathy Gilbeaux

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov - Epidemics. 2015 Jun;11:80-4. doi: 10.1016/j.epidem.2015.03.001. Epub 2015 Mar 21

Abstract

International air travel has already spread Ebola virus disease (EVD) to major cities as part of the unprecedented epidemic that started in Guinea in December 2013. An infected airline passenger arrived in Nigeria on July 20, 2014 and caused an outbreak in Lagos and then Port Harcourt. After a total of 20 reported cases, including 8 deaths, Nigeria was declared EVD free on October 20, 2014. We quantified the impact of early control measures in preventing further spread of EVD in Nigeria and calculated the risk that a single undetected case will cause a new outbreak. We fitted an EVD transmission model to data from the outbreak in Nigeria and estimated the reproduction number of the index case at 9.0 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 5.2-15.6). We also found that the net reproduction number fell below unity 15 days (95% CI: 11-21 days) after the arrival of the index case. Hence, our study illustrates the time window for successful containment of EVD outbreaks caused by infected air travelers.

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