INFECTION CONTROL TODAY                                      March 24, 2015
The World Health Organization (WHO) is publishing a series, "Ebola Diaries," with first-person accounts of WHO staff and others deployed to the field for Ebola response since the first cases were reported in West Africa on March 23, 2014.
 
Dr. Stéphane Hugonnet, team lead for gobal capacities, alert and responses for the World Health Organization (WHO), was one of the first WHO experts sent to Guinea to investigate cases of Ebola reported in late March 2014. A medical doctor who has spent the past 20 years working for WHO, MSF and others, managing outbreaks ranging from cholera, measles and yellow fever, to Lassa, Ebola and meningitis, Hugonnet found a very different sort of outbreak when he arrived in Guinea.

"We were following this rumor of a small cluster of unexplained deaths in Guinea," he says. "Some thought it could be Lassa    phane fever, but the transmission pattern was very compatible with Ebola. When the lab results came back, we learned that there was Ebola Zaire in West Africa.            

sciencedirect.com - June 2014
Justin Stoler, Rawan al Dashti, Francis Anto, Julius N. Fobil, Gordon A. Awandare
doi:10.1016/j.actatropica.2014.02.017

CLICK HERE - Deconstructing “Malaria”: West Africa as the Next Front for Dengue Fever Surveillance and Control

Highlights

• Febrile illnesses are vastly overdiagnosed as malaria in many African settings.

• West Africa is emerging as a new front for dengue fever surveillance and control.

• Efficient health care utilization depends upon proper diagnosis of febrile illness.

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO by Nurith Aizenman                March 23, 2015

Recruiting and training new health workers is key, because experts warn that unless the health systems in West Africa are brought up to scratch, an epidemic on the scale of this one will happen again.

Unfortunately, building national health systems doesn't tend to attract a lot of love from international donors, says Erin Hohlfelder, who's been pushing for this kind of funding on behalf of the ONE Campaign, a global health advocacy group.

"It's certainly not as 'sexy' — quote unquote — as things like treatment for HIV or bed nets for malaria, which are very tangible and easy to understand."

She says at least for now, the international community does seem to get the importance of building up West Africa's health systems. The governments of the affected countries are preparing national plans to present at a meeting of the World Bank next month

BBC   by  Smitha Mundasad                                                                                        March 23, 2015

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa will be over by August, the head of the UN Ebola mission has told the BBC.

 Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed admitted the UN had made mistakes in handling the crisis early on, sometimes acting "arrogantly".

A year after the outbreak was officially declared, the virus has killed more than 10,000 people...

The head of the UN Ebola response mission told the BBC, when the virus first struck, "there was probably a lack of knowledge and there was a certain degree of arrogance, but I think we are learning lessons.

"We have been running away from giving any specific date, but I am pretty sure myself that it will be gone by the summer."

Read complete story.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32009508