Government

WASHINGTON POST by Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson                             Feb. 13, 2015

WASHINGTON --If there is to be war, the fight against Ebola is President Obama’s type of war. The enemy fires no bullets and carries no bombs; it doesn’t use social media to recruit fighters and rally supporters. And the fighting can best be done by intelligent professionals who don’t try to kill people, but to save them.

On Wednesday, Obama celebrated the progress against the deadly virus since the administration launched a military and civilian effort in September. While the president emphasized it was too soon to declare “mission accomplished” — as President George W. Bush did about Iraq in 2003 — Obama said “we’re shifting our focus from fighting the epidemic to now extinguishing it.”

NEW YORK TIMES  by Somini Sengupta                                                  Jan. 7, 2015

....Now, Ebola is battering three fragile countries in Africa and with it, the W.H.O.’s standing — in large part, Dr. Chan’s critics say, because she let governments around the world steer the agency to fit their own needs, instead of firmly taking the helm as the world’s doctor in chief.

Diplomacy is an inevitable, even necessary, part of running the world’s main health organization, vital to getting fractious countries to cooperate for the sake of global health, her critics acknowledge.

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS  by Sue Ambrose                                     Dec. 27, 2014

DALLAS, Texas --When Ebola surfaced in the U.S., federal guidelines to protect medical workers here were weaker than the ones that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had in place 15 years earlier, The Dallas Morning News has found.

It’s not known exactly how nurse Nina Pham contracted Ebola while caring for patient Thomas Eric Duncan. Shown here at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, she was later successfully treated at a National Institutes of Health hospital in Maryland. Agence France-Presse

A review of CDC documents and archived Web pages shows that a 1998 protocol originally written for health care workers in Africa had more protective measures than the one for U.S. caregivers when Thomas Eric Duncan became the first patient diagnosed with Ebola in this country.

Two Dallas nurses were infected with the deadly virus while treating Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, where he died in early October....

HUFFINGTON POST     by  Arthur Delany                                                                      Dec, 22, 2014

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) traveled to the West African nation of Liberia this week, partly to remind the American people that an Ebola epidemic is still going on, Coons told reporters Monday.

                     Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) elbow-bumps an Ebola survivor in Liberia. | Chris Coons Flickr | Flickr

"My hope was to remind the American people that this is an investment that helps keep the world safe, not just help Liberians, although helping Liberia is a worthy goal in and of itself," Coons said on a conference call in response to a question from HuffPost.