WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan last night addressed the World Health Assembly, a gathering of the world’s leading health practitioners and policy makers.

Her message was blunt.

“Let me give you a stern warning. What we are seeing now looks more and more like a dramatic resurgence of the threat from emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. The world is not prepared to cope.

On Saturday, the World Bank Group officially launched its much anticipated Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility — a financing mechanism designed to quickly mobilize funds to tackle global disease outbreaks and create a new insurance market for pandemic risk. Questions linger about how effective the new mechanism will be, how much money it can leverage, and whether it can stand the test of time against pandemics that are growing more frequent and more costly.

The international community struggled to effectively mobilize funds to bring an end to the Ebola virus outbreak that ravaged West Africa in 2014, killing thousands. The latest global health emergency to grip the world’s attention — the Zika virus — is highlighting again just how ill-prepared the international community is to fund cross-border outbreak response. Three months after the U.S. White House requested $1.9 billion for Zika, the U.S. Congress is still arguing over the sum.

The world's leading countries, companies and philanthropists will join forces to create a 'major breakthrough' to provide education for millions of children displaced by conflicts and natural disasters.The new 'Education Cannot Wait' fund will be launched next week at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul.

A historic, global-first hailed a 'game changer,' the fund targets the needs of 75 million children and youth impacted by crisis, disaster and conflict.

CLICK HERE - WHO confirms Zika virus strain imported from the Americas to Cabo Verde

CLICK HERE - CDC - Zika Virus in Cape Verde

who.int - digitaljournal.com - by AGNÈS PEDRERO (AFP) - May 20, 2016

The Zika virus strain linked to surging cases of neurological disorders and birth defects in Latin America has now been found in Africa, health officials said Friday, as the first fatality on French territory was reported on the Caribbean island of Martinique.

The World Health Organization announced that the strain of Zika circulating in Cape Verde had been shown to be the same as the one behind an explosion of cases in the Americas.

"This is the first time that strain of Zika which has been showed to cause neurological disorders and microcephaly... has been detected in Africa," Matshidiso Moeti, WHO's Africa regional chief, told reporters in Geneva.

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World Bank President Jim Yong Kim speaks during a panel discussion at the Anti-Corruption Summit in London, Thursday, May 12, 2016.  REUTERS/FRANK AUGSTEIN/POOL

reuters.com - by David Lawder - May 20, 2016

The World Bank on Saturday said it was launching a $500 million, fast-disbursing insurance fund to combat deadly pandemics in poor countries, creating the world's first insurance market for pandemic risk. . . . 

. . . In the event of a pandemic outbreak, the facility will release funds quickly to affected poor countries and qualified international first-responder agencies. . . . 

. . . The so-called Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility will initially provide up to $500 million that can be disbursed quickly to fight a pandemic, with funds released once parametric triggers are met, based on the size, severity and spread of an outbreak.

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Introduction: The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa raised many questions about the control of infectious disease in an increasingly connected global society. Limited availability of contact information made contact tracing diffcult or impractical in combating the outbreak. 

Methods: We consider the development of multi-scale public health strategies that act on individual and community levels. We simulate policies for community-level response aimed at early screening all members of a community, as well as travel restrictions to prevent inter-community transmission. 

Freetown after Independence in 1961 up to the early seventies was a reasonably clean city. Local dump sites for garbage were strategically located all over the city and were regularly cleared out by either the City Council or the Ministry of Health. The City Council was then a vibrant entity focused on providing municipal services to the City. Drains were cleaned out regularly by Council or through the services of Contractors such as the late Ajibu Jalloh and others. Markets were washed through an arrangement with the Fire Force. 

The Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone (HRCSL) yesterday organized a round table engagement in their conference room on the acute shortage of water supply in Freetown and other parts of the country.

thelancet.com - May 18, 2016 - DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30386-5

Interpretation

Our report shows that previously unanticipated, late, severe relapses of Ebola virus can occur, in this case in the CNS. This finding fundamentally redefines what is known about the natural history of Ebola virus infection. Vigilance should be maintained in the thousands of Ebola survivors for cases of relapsed infection. The potential for these cases to initiate new transmission chains is a serious public health concern.

Image: Anhydrous ammonia plant, ca. 1954. ROBERT W. KELLEY/TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

wired.com - Sarah Zhang - May 16th 2016

Of all the elements that make up Earth’s atmosphere, nitrogen is by far the most abundant. It is also one of the most inert. Nothing happens when you breathe it in, swallow it, or let it suffuse your skin.

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Non-invasive contact with Ebola survivors 6 weeks after the virus has been cleared poses little risk for healthcare workers, though contact with semen, ocular humor, and cerebrospinal fluid requires Ebola-appropriate precautions, according to a study yesterday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

A cross-sectional cohort study evaluated 555 specimens from 112 Ebola survivors without fever seeking follow-up care at a clinic in Freetown, Sierra Leone, from Apr 2 to Jun 16, 2015. Almost one third of survivors (34, or 30%) were under the age of 16, and 50 (40%) were male.

Samples were obtained from the armpit (103 specimens), blood (93), conjunctiva (92), forehead (54), mouth (105), rectum (17), semen (1), urine (69), and vagina (21). The median time from Ebola treatment unit discharge to specimen collection was 142 days.

GENEVA - The World Health Organization will hold an emergency meeting Thursday on the yellow fever outbreak that has hit hardest in Angola but risks spreading further if vaccinations are not ramped up.

Some of the final cases of Ebola in Sierra Leone were transmitted via unconventional routes, such as semen and breastmilk, according to the largest analysis to date of the tail-end of the epidemic.

An international team of researchers has produced a detailed picture of the latter stages of the outbreak in Sierra Leone, using real-time sequencing of Ebola virus genomes carried out in a temporary laboratory in the country.

Nearly a third of American teens with iOS devices do not have a data plan, according to Juxta Labs. Photo credit: Pabak Sarkar (Creative Commons)

forbes.com - by Parmy Olson - June 10, 2015

“What most people don’t realize,” says Jared Allgood, the co-founder behind the hot new messaging app that’s spreading quickly across U.S. middle and high schools, “is that we have a developing nation within America. It’s the American teen.”

Allgood’s app, Jott, has been seeing the kind of hockey-stick growth that app developers dream of: a 10x increase in users between March and May 2015, and almost entirely across that elusive demographic of teens. Adding 10-20,000 users a day it’s up to 500,000 active users on iOS, and is coming to Android this fall, when Allgood expects a jump in users as the new school year gets underway.

What’s compelling about Jott is that its growth isn’t the result of a snazzy new feature that all the kids are raving about. It’s simply met an economic need.

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