AFP   Sept. 9, 2015

Geneva -- Guinea has notched up a week without a new case of Ebola, a first since March 2014, the head of the UN's response to the epidemic, Bruce Aylward, said on Wednesday.

Health workers with a patient under quarantine at the Nongo Ebola treatment centre in Conakry, Guinea on August 21, 2015 (AFP Photo/Cellou Binani)

"As of today, they have gone seven days without a (new) case of Ebola," said Aylward, the World Health Organization's special envoy for the epidemic.

"That is the longest period since March of last year that Guinea has gone without an Ebola case," he added.

There are two people in the country who have Ebola, but they tested postive before September 2.

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http://news.yahoo.com/guinea-passes-one-week-no-ebola-case-142016881.html

VOICE OF AMERICAN by James Butty  Sept. 9, 2015
Three more people have tested positive for Ebola from the same village in Sierra Leone's northern Kambia district of the country where a 67-year-old woman died last week from the virus, Sierra Leone health officials said.

Chief medical officer Dr. Brima Kargbo told VOA Tuesday the three new patients came from among the 50 high-risk persons identified as close relatives of the deceased woman. 

Sierra Leone has had nearly 14,000 cases of Ebola and about 4,000 deaths since the outbreak began in 2014.  But Dr. Kargbo said the latest outbreak is containable because its origin is traceable....

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http://www.voanews.com/content/new-ebola-patients-found-in-sierra-leone/2953488.html

afro.who.int

Bamako, 7 September 2015 – A case of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) has been confirmed in Bamako, the capital and largest city of Mali. The country is on high alert after national authorities detected a paralysis case with onset 20 July 2015. The patient is a 19-month old child of Guinean nationality whose paralysis occurred 7 days prior to the child’s arrival in Bamako to seek health care. The last case of wild polio virus (WPV) in Mali dates back to June 2011 in Goundam, Timbuktu Region.

The current detected virus is genetically linked to a confirmed VDPV detected in Siguiri district, in the Kankan Region of Guinea in August 2014, and has been circulating across international borders for more than 2 years without detection. 

The risk of spread of this virus is deemed high and it has the capacity to cause paralytic disease in humans or kill. The emergence and circulation of VDPV2 reveals low population immunity against the virus due to low rates of vaccination coverage in Guinea. Consequently, oral polio vaccine (OPV) must be administered multiple times to stop the outbreak and protect children. 

Photographer - Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg

bloomberg.com - by Tara Patel - August 31, 2015

TECH TIMES by rina Maria Doctor     Sept. 3, 2015
The World Health Organization (WHO) is set to vaccinate about 200 people in Sierra Leone, who were believed to have been directly or indirectly exposed to a woman who succumbed to death due to the virus on Saturday, Aug. 29.

The 67-year-old woman, whose diagnostic test results came positive for Ebola, was a merchant from the Kambia District, which is close to the border of Guinea. She died five days after Sierra Leone has begun a countdown projected to last for 42 days before the country may be declared free from the deadly virus. Before her diagnosis, the last patient diagnosed with the disease was reported on Aug. 8....

WHO will immunize the people in the area of Tonko Limba who have had direct and indirect exposures to the deceased, says Margaret Harris, a spokesperson from WHO. This effort will also include people who have had close contacts with the said exposed individuals....

massgeneral.org - August 27, 2015

While most primary care physicians responding to a survey taken in late 2014 and early 2015 expressed confidence in their ability to identify potential cases of Ebola and communicate Ebola risks to their patients, only 50 to 70 percent of them gave answers that fit with CDC guidelines when asked how they would care for hypothetical patients who might have been exposed to Ebola. In addition, those who were least likely to encounter an Ebola patient – based on their location and characteristics of their patients – were most likely to choose overly intense management of patients actually at low risk.  The results of the survey, conducted by a team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators, have been published online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

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CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - Ebola Risk and Preparedness: A National Survey of Internists 

Image:  A lobsterman threw back a lobster near Mount Desert, Me. in 2012. The catch in the area has reached record highs. Credit Robert F Bukaty/Associated Press

nytimes.com - September 3rd, 2015 - Carl Zimmer

Up in Maine, lobsters are thriving. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission reported last month that stocks there have reached a record high.

Down the coast, however, the story is different.

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Image: Children after an India polio-vaccination event, 2012. Courtesy CDC.gov

phenomena.nationalgeographic.com - September 2nd, 2015 - Maryn McKenna

At the end of the decades-long global battle to eradicate polio from the planet, there is what looks like a simple goal: Render every person immune, by vaccination, for long enough that the disease can find no host in which to breed, and thus dies out. That was the strategy behind the eradication of smallpox, and since polio like smallpox affects only humans, it is supposed to work for that disease too.

Of course, it’s a little more complicated, and a paper published last week reveals one of the most challenging complications.

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Source:Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) - Date Published:08/20/2015

Annotation:This 38-page document provides a standard format for creating an Ebola Concept of Operations (ConOps) plan at the state, territorial, or major metropolitan area government level. It provides information on measures local governments, agencies, and organizations can take to support the plan. The ConOps in the template describes strategic, high-level considerations for establishing a regional tiered system to safely and effectively manage persons under investigation (PUIs) or patients confirmed with Ebola.

(38 page .PDF document)
URL: http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/documents/ebola-concept-of-operations-planning-template-8-20-2015.pdf

Authors:Dugas, Robert; Lamoureux, Joe; Mangieri, William; et al.
Type:Guideline/Assessment Tool
ID:11129. From Disaster LitTM, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

http://disasterlit.nlm.nih.gov/record/11129

Hundreds of families have set up camp underneath Budapest's eastern station

Hundreds of migrants are in a standoff with police for a second night outside a Budapest railway station.

bbc.com - September 2, 2015

Earlier, scuffles broke out between the two sides as frustration among migrants boiled over outside Keleti station.

Many of the migrants have tickets and are insisting they be allowed to travel on to Germany and other countries, but Hungary says it is enforcing EU rules.

Meanwhile, Germany, Italy and France have called for "fair distribution" of refugees throughout the EU.

In a joint declaration, the country's three foreign ministers also called for Europe's asylum laws to be revised, the Italian foreign ministry said in a statement (in Italian).

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BARAA AL-HALABI via Getty Images

There were challenges due to conflict, insecurity and deliberate obstructions.

huffingtonpost.com - AP - by Edith M. Lederer - August 26, 2015

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon accused all parties in the Syrian conflict of "indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks" on civilians and said the U.N. and its partners couldn't deliver food to 422,000 people in besieged areas in July.

Ban said in his monthly report to the U.N. Security Council circulated Tuesday that access to the 4.6 million Syrians in hard-to-reach areas - most controlled by Islamic State extremists - remains a critical concern with extremely limited humanitarian access.

He said U.N. agencies and their partners reached only 29 of the 127 hard-to-reach locations last month, and in the besieged areas, the only aid that arrived was a trickle of health assistance to 1.8 percent of the population.

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VOICE OF AMERICA by James Butty  Sept. 2, 2015

 Sierra Leone Tuesday quarantined 50 people in the northern district of Kambia, where a 76 year-old woman died over the weekend from Ebola. The country had just celebrated the release from the hospital of its last known Ebola patient.

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http://www.voanews.com/content/sierra-leone-quarantines-50-following-latest-ebola-death/2941906.html

Ebolavirus, animal - Uganda: porcine, epidemiological assessment

CLICK HERE - Assessing the Potential Role of Pigs in the Epidemiology of Ebola Virus in Uganda

promedmail.org - September 2, 2015

Summary

Uganda has experienced 4 Ebola outbreaks since the discovery of the virus. Recent epidemiological work has shown pigs are hosts for ebolaviruses. Due to their high reproduction rates, rapid weight gain, potential to provide quick financial returns, and rising demand for pork, pig production in Uganda has undergone massive expansion. The combination of pork sector growth supported by development programmes and Ebola virus risk prompted a foresight exercise using desk, interview, and spatial methods. The study found that the lack of serological evidence for specific reservoir species, the number of human index cases unable to account for their source of infection, domestic pig habitat overlap with potential Ebola virus zoonotic host environments, reported interactions at the human-pig-wildlife interface that could support transmission, fever in pigs as a commonly reported problem by pig farmers, and temporal correlation of outbreaks with peak pork consumption periods, warrants further research into potential zoonotic transmission in Uganda from pigs.

thenewdawnliberia.com - by Ben P. Wesee - Editing by Jonathan Browne -September 1, 2015

The four Mano River Union or MRU countries – Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast have issued a joint communiqué in Monrovia, calling for information sharing, experiences and good practices during and after health emergencies in order to collaborate and network with local and international partners in the sub-region.

In a just ended conference here on the Ebola Virus Disease or EVD, the MRU countries also advanced several recommendations. Delegates from the four countries recommended in the communiqué a need to develop a harmonized framework for adherence to ethical standards during health disasters with appropriate and approved mechanisms for vaccines, therapeutic agents and testing methods.

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(ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE)

Ebola Situation Reports:

CLICK HERE -  Interagency Collaboration on Ebola - Situation Report - 1 September 2015 (7 page .PDF report)

CLICK HERE - Report Archives - Interagency Collaboration on Ebola

Note:

The numbers of suspected Ebola cases have increased by 2 in Guinea, and by 6 in Sierra Leone per the Aug. 30 data as compared to the August 29 data.

August 30 data (Published September 1)
http://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.ebola-sitrep.ebola-summary-20150901?lang=en

August 29 data (Published August 31)
http://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.ebola-sitrep.ebola-summary-20150831?lang=en