Disaster Response

NEW YORK TIMES                             Oct. 8, 2014

DETAILED STORY OF WHAT A DAY IS LIKE IN A LIBERIAN EBOLA CLINIC

By Sheri Fink, MD

MDSUAKOKO, Liberia — The dirt road winds and dips, passes through a rubber plantation and arrives up a hill, near the grounds of an old leper colony. The latest scourge, Ebola, is under assault here in a cluster of cobalt-blue buildings operated by an American charity, International Medical Corps. In the newly opened treatment center, Liberian workers and volunteers from abroad identify who is infected, save those they can and try to halt the virus’s spread.

It is a place both ordinary and otherworldly. Young men who feel well enough run laps around the ward; acrid smoke wafts from a medical waste incinerator into the expansive tropical sky; doctors are unrecognizable in yellow protective suits; patients who may not have Ebola listen to a radio with those who do, separated by a fence and fresh air.

Here are the rhythms of a single day:

AFP                           OCT. 8, 2014

Brussels (AFP) - The European Union said Tuesday it is urgently airlifting relief goods to West Africa to combat the Ebola crisis, as the disease threatened its shores with an infection in Spain.

Three 747 jumbo jet cargo planes carrying 100 tonnes of aid will be sent to the worst-affected countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, the European Commission said.

The first plane leaves on Friday for Freetown carrying personal protection equipment including masks and gloves and medicines.

 SEE FULL ARTICLE

http://news.yahoo.com/eu-sends-ebola-airlift-west-africa-191524011.html?utm_source=October+8+2014+EN&utm_campaign=10%2F8%2F2014&utm_medium=email

Commentary by Jim Young Kim, President of the World Bank Group 
                                                              Oct. 6, 2014

As the spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa shows, the importance of reducing inequality could not be more clear. The battle against the virus is a fight on many fronts -- human lives and health foremost among them.

But the fight against Ebola is also a fight against inequality. The knowledge and infrastructure to treat the sick and contain the virus exists in high- and middle-income counties. However, over many years, we have failed to make these things accessible to low-income people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. So now thousands of people in these countries are dying because, in the lottery of birth, they were born in the wrong place.

See full article

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-yong-kim/the-fight-against-ebola-i_b_5938716.html

UPDATED  With additional information  (Scroll below).

TIME

By Zeke J. Miller                              Oct. 6. 2014                5:24 PM

President Barack Obama said Monday that the U.S. is working on additional passenger screenings for airline passengers flying from Ebola-stricken West Africa, two weeks after a Liberian man infected with the disease entered the country.

Officials are “going to be working on protocols to do additional passenger screenings both at the source and here in the United States,” Obama said, addressing reporters following a briefing on his administration’s response to the epidemic in Africa and efforts to keep the disease from spreading to the U.S. “All of these things make me confident that here in the United States at least the chances of an outbreak, of an epidemic here are extraordinarily low.”

The president did not give specifics on the new screening measures, and Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declined to elaborate further in an interview with CNN after the meeting.