NEW SCIENTIST  Opinion                                   May 6, 2015

...HOW the world has changed. In 1948, the first commercial jet airliner was still a few years away from take-off, and the global population was just over 2 billion. Less than one-third lived in cities. Back then, safeguarding global health seemed an eminently manageable project. The newly formed United Nations agreed, and established the World Health Organization.

 Now, over half the planet's 7 billion people are packed into urban areas. Between us, we travel tens of billions of kilometres around the globe every year, with plenty of pathogens and parasites coming along for the ride. The WHO, largely unchanged since its creation, is ill-equipped to deal with the disease threats that this new world creates.

The recent Ebola outbreak is a case in point. Even the WHO's director-general, Margaret Chan, said her organisation was "overwhelmed" and admitted that a crisis on that scale "cannot be solved by a single agency".

DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS                             May 6, 2015

Image: Kathmandu Living Labs' earthquake site collects data about conditions and needs. Each blue dot represents the number of reports of help wanted — medical, food, water or shelter — near Kathmandu. Kathmandu Living Labs

npr.org - May 5th 2015 - David Lagesse

These pleas for help in the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake have popped up on ever changing maps of the disaster zone, compiled and posted by hundreds of digital volunteers around the globe. They've not been to Nepal and very likely haven't met each other, instead working together through online forums and chat rooms and posting their work to Web documents and maps.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

ALL AFRICA  THE NEW REPUBLIC Liberia by Reuben Sei Waylaun May 6, 2015
MONROVIA -- A study conducted by the Social Mobilization and Behavior Change Communication at the Ministry of Health in collaboration with UNICEF has shown that radio played significant roles in the fight against the deadly Ebola virus in the country.

The head of the Social Mobilization and Behavior Change Communication, Rev. John Sumo said radio played a critical role in the awareness figuring to 93% out of the study conducted on 1100 households in the five worst hit counties in December 2014.

He said, "during the study, 93% of the respondents said they first learnt about Ebola from the radio. They acknowledged that radio messages were complimented in collaboration with information from their closest neighbors and the print media...."

Read complete story.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201505060574.html

LIVESCIENCE  by Rachel Rettner                                                          May 6, 2015

The Ebola virus can live on surfaces in hospitals for nearly two weeks, a new study suggests.

Researchers tested how long the Ebola virus could survive on plastic, stainless steel and Tyvek, a material used in Ebola suits. The researchers also simulated different environmental conditions, including a climate-controlled hospital at 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius) and 40 percent humidity, and the typical environment of West Africa, at 80 F (27 C) and 80 percent humidity.

In general, the virus survived on surfaces for a longer time when in the climate-controlled conditions than in the West African environment, the study found. Under hospital-like conditions, the virus lived for 11 days on Tyvek, eight days on plastic and four days on stainless steel. The longest the virus was able to survive in the tropical conditions of the West African environment was three days, on Tyvek.

Read complete story.

http://www.livescience.com/50758-ebola-virus-survival-surfaces.html

AFP                                                                                        May 6, 2015

Geneva -- The number of deaths from the Ebola epidemic now exceeds 11,000, figures from the World Health Organization showed on Wednesday.

In the three countries worst affected -- Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea -- 26,593 people were infected, and 11,005 had died, the WHO said.

Only nine new cases were recorded in each country last week, the lowest figures for almost a year.

Read complete story.

http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-deaths-pass-11-000-mark-223707192.html

See WHO Ebola situation report 6 May, 2015

http://apps.who.int/ebola/en/current-situation/ebola-situation-report-6-may-2015

Now the threat from Ebola seems to be receding, rich countries must not revert to their former myopia. Listening to other countries’ needs and investing in women and children would be a start

THE GUARDIAN Commentary  by Chelsea Clinton and Devi Sridar                May 6, 2015

Amnesia has set in across the world as the fear and global attention given to Ebolarecedes. But this is not a new phenomenon. With Sars, avian flu, swine flu and Mers, there were repeated calls to fix the global health system to avoid previous mistakes. We cannot continue to be surprised when a health crisis emerges and we need to start to take a long-term, inclusive perspective to ensure health security across the world. Myopia was a key factor in the failure to respond to Ebola in a rapid and effective way.

There are three immediate steps that should be taken:

Read complete article.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/06/ebola-global-health-priorities-chelsea-clinton

UNITED NATIONS NEWS CENTRE                          May 5, 2015
Liberia is expected to be declared Ebola-free by the World Health Organization (WHO) within the week if no more new cases of the disease are discovered before then, the top United Nations official in Liberia said Tuesday  as she briefed the Security Councl.

Karin Landgren, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Liberia and Head of the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), briefs the Security Council. UN Photo/Mark Garten

“After almost 14 months spent under the cloud of Ebola, this will be joyful news for the country,” said Karin Landgren, Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Liberia. “Liberians and their Government, with support from the UN and ineternational partners, have gotten firmly ahead of the epidemic. Now, all Liberians must remain vigilant.”

Drone footage shot by ABC cameraman Brant Cumming in the Gorkha district shows buildings reduced to rubble by the April 25 earthquake. This video highlights the remoteness of the affected areas in Nepal and the difficulties faced by rescue personnel struggling to reach them.

submitted by George Hurlburt

theconversation.com - by Gerard Fitzgerald, Apil Gurung, and Bharat Raj Poudel - May 5, 2015

The media in Nepal has been instrumental in keeping people connected and updated about the recent magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit the country on Saturday April 25.

However, initially the quake did not create a major reaction, as small scale tremors are not uncommon in the country. The Nepalese people were also unclear about the extent of the disaster as local media struggled to react to the earthquake.

The reality of the scale of the disaster began to sink in when heartbreaking pictures of the damage started emerging. Live footage and pictures from the international media gave some insight into the extent of the devastation in the earthquake ravaged nation.

SCIENCE   by Martin Enserink                                                                           May 1, 2015
...Guinea is where some of the last embers of West Africa's Ebola epidemic are smoldering. It had only 21 new Ebola cases in the past week, 16 of them in the city of Forécariah, a 3-hour drive from the capital. Guards at many official buildings still routinely point the Thermoflash, a contact less, revolver-shaped thermometer, at visitors' temples, and vats full of bleach are still omnipresent.

 But Ebola rarely makes headlines anymore, and antigovernment protests that paralyzed Conakry last week were about upcoming elections, not the virus.

Still, Guinea's Ebola czar, Sakoba Keita, notes that there have been lulls before, the last one in January, that were invariably followed by flare-ups.

...Guinea's stubborn epidemic means that it may soon be the last place where researchers can do real-world tests of Ebola treatments and vaccines.
Read complete story.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6234/485.full

CANADIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION by Moneeza Walji                                    Mayl 4, 2015
The call to action for the Ebola outbreak extended far and wide, with the epidemic now having more than 26 000 cases and claiming more than 10 000 lives, but the response has raised questions about underlying problems that hinder health care in some countries and about who was best positioned to respond.

At a recent session of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health in Boston, Dr. Peter Piot, one of the discoverers of the Ebola virus, said the outbreak and crisis in West Africa "has revealed major fault lines in the local societies and in the international system; in how we conduct research and how we develop new drugs and vaccines and also in trust and the way that international aid and development and cooperation is operating."

NEW YORK TIMES  by Sheri Fink, MD                         May 5, 2015

(Contains new information on the origin of the Ebola epidemic.)

Scientists are using blood samples collected throughout the Ebola outbreak to map the virus’s spread from country to country by tracking tiny mutations in its gene sequences.

The picture is not yet complete, but intriguing discoveries have been made. Virus mutations first detected in Sierra Leone last spring were found later in Liberia and Mali, and scientists are examining whether this resulted from the chance movements of people across borders....

Set of graphs on the Ebola Outbreak

THE ECONOMIST   by the Graphics Team                                                                   May 5, 2015 

The outbreak continues to claim lives, but Liberia could be confirmed Ebola free on May 9th. The situation in Guinea and Sierra Leone is also improving with fewer provinces reporting cases than in previous weeks. The World Health Organisation reports that each country now has enough treatment beds to be able to isolate and treat patients with Ebola, and to bury everyone known to have died of the disease.

The chart above shows numbers from both the WHO's regular situation reports and from patient databases, which tend to be more accurate but are less complete for recent weeks.
See complete story and set of graphics.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/05/ebola-graphics

NEW YORK TIMES  By NEIL GENZLINGER                     May 3, 2015

(UPDATE: Scroll down for link to the PBS FRONTLINE  program on Ebola originally aired last night on American television.)

Heartbreaking stories from the Ebola outbreak are familiar by now, although that doesn’t make them any easier to hear, and a “Frontline” installment being broadcast on PBS on Tuesday night has its share. But it also has something less familiar: Officials acknowledging that they could have done a better job of responding to the crisis.

FOREIGN POLICY   by Freddie Wilson                                                         May 2, 2015
The country has just a handful of private helicopters, which are crucial to earthquake rescue operations. But are foreign trekkers the only ones who’ve benefitted?
In the wake of the earthquake, it became immediately clear that choppers would be crucial to lifesaving rescue operations. Landslides have besieged Nepal, wrecking many sections of its already tenuous road system. People are trapped in remote villages — or what remain of them — while supplies are bottlenecked at the Tribhuvan International Airport, in Kathmandu. “The planning over many years seems to have failed to take account of the fact that hard to reach places — most of those badly hit — would remain hard to reach, after the quake,” wrote John Bevan, who has worked with the U.N. in Nepal and Haiti, in an email from Kathmandu.