Africa Resilience Initiative

REUTERS by Kate Kelland                                     Jan. 23, 2015

LONDON-- The first batch of GlaxoSmithKline's experimental Ebola vaccine has been shipped to West Africa and is expected to arrive in Liberia later on Friday, the British drugmaker said.

The shipment, of an initial 300 vials of the vaccine, will be the first to arrive in one of the three main Ebola-affected African countries, GSK said in a statement.

It will be used in the first large-scale vaccine trials in coming weeks, in which healthcare workers helping to care for Ebola patients will be among the first to get it...

The vaccine, co-developed by the National Institutes of Health in the United States and Okairos, a biotechnology firm acquired by GSK in 2013, is currently being tested in five small phase I safety trials in Britain, the United States, Switzerland and Mali involving around 200 healthy volunteers in total.

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http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/01/23/uk-health-ebola-gsk-idUKKBN0KW0DU20150123

Twenty percent of the nation’s surgical practitioners have been killed by Ebola

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN  by Seema Yasmin and Chethan Sathya                                   Jan. 22, 2015

Thaim Kamara is 60 years old and would like to retire this year. But he is one of only eight remaining surgeons in Sierra Leone, a west African country of about six million people. Kamara lost two friends to Ebola in 2014—Martin Salia and Thomas Rogers, fellow surgeons at Connaught Hospital in the capital, Freetown. In light of the dire circumstances, Kamara has postponed his plan to retire.

REUTERS by Stephanie Nebehay                                                                        Jan. 22, 2015

GENEVA (Reuters) - The Ebola epidemic in West Africa appears to be ebbing, with fewer than 150 cases reported in the past week, but efforts must be pursued to stamp out the deadly disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday.

Sierra Leone remains hardest-hit, accounting for 117 of the 145 new confirmed cases, against 184 there the previous week and 248 the week before that, the WHO said in its latest update.

"Case incidence continues to fall in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone," the United Nations agency said, adding that disease surveillance was being stepped up in border districts of Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal....

The WHO's Emergency Committee on Ebola said on Wednesday that passengers should still be screened on leaving Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone for temperature or other signs of infection.

The independent experts said in a statement that "more than 40 countries have implemented additional measures, such as quarantine of returning travellers and refusal of entry. Such measures are impeding the recruitment and return of international responders.

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THE CONVERSATION  by Meera Inglis (affiliated with the Green Party of England)     Jan. 20, 2015

                                                  Ebola has wiped out a third of the world’s gorillas.

THE CONVERSATION  by Meera Inglis (affiliated with the Green Party of England)                       Jan. 20, 2015

There is a side to the Ebola crisis that, perhaps understandably, has received little media attention: the threat it poses to our nearest cousins, the great apes of Africa. At this moment in time Ebola is the single greatest threat to the survival of gorillas and chimpanzees.

The virus is even more deadly for other great apes as it is for humans, with mortality rates approximately 95% for gorillas and 77% for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Current estimates suggest a third of the world’s gorillas and chimpanzees have died from Ebola since the 1990s.