Sierra Leone

allafrica.com - Front Page Africa - by Bettie Johnson - June 22, 2015

. . . The country is now in a panic mode after a sick lady from neighboring Guinea was intercepted by security officers at a checkpoint deep inside Liberian territory, raising fears that the episode of 2014 which brought Ebola to Liberia is threatening to reemerge. . . .

. . . A Global Communities Surveillance Officer disclosed that although they are carrying out temperature checks on commuters, people using illegal entry points are moving without going through health screening. . . .

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LANCET by Patrick G. T. Walker and others                               Volume 15, No. 7, p825–832, July 2015
The ongoing Ebola epidemic in parts of west Africa largely overwhelmed health-care systems in 2014, making adequate care for malaria impossible and threatening the gains in malaria control achieved over the past decade. We quantified this additional indirect burden of Ebola virus disease.

We estimated the number of cases and deaths from malaria in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone from Demographic and Health Surveys data for malaria prevalence and coverage of malaria interventions before the Ebola outbreak. We then removed the effect of treatment and hospital care to estimate additional cases and deaths from malaria caused by reduced health-care capacity and potential disruption of delivery of insecticide-treated bednets. We modelled the potential effect of emergency mass drug administration in affected areas on malaria cases and health-care demand....

REUTERS  by Stella Dawson                                                          JUNE 18, 2015

WASHINGTON -- The Ebola epidemic exposed long-standing holes in aid delivery,  which desperately needs an overhaul before the next international emergency hits, aid experts said on Thursday.

Supplies for the Ebola zone in West Africa wait to be loaded at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport September 20, 2014. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Many of the shortcomings seen during the Haiti earthquake of slow responses and uncoordinated relief efforts were repeated during the Ebola crisis that erupted in West Africa a year ago, they said.

With Sierra Leone and Guinea continuing to report cases of the deadly virus, the international community must act urgently, said Carolyn Reynolds, external relations manager at the World Bank.

"We need to think outside the box," she said at a panel on global health preparedness held on Capitol Hill.

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www.trust.org/item/20150618215202-ilvea/?source=fiOtherNews2

CHEMISTRY WORLD by Christopher Barnard             June 17, 215
The virulence of Ebola virus strains appears to be innately linked to the degree of disorder in proteins that form their nucleocapsids. Computational analysis has revealed that strains responsible for the most lethal outbreaks of Ebola show significantly higher levels of intrinsic protein disorder than less virulent strains, in a discovery that could constitute a major breakthrough in understanding the pathogen’s behaviour.

With over 27,000 confirmed, probable and suspected cases and more than 11,000 fatalities worldwide, the ongoing Ebola outbreak has resulted in considerably more casualties since late 2013 than all other outbreaks combined. There are no effective treatments or vaccines against the haemorrhagic fever that evinces Ebola infection; however, strains of the virus with drastically different virulence have emerged since the first outbreak in 1976, with fatality rates ranging from 25 to 90%.