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Head of World Bank Makes Ebola His Mission

NEW YORK TIMES                                                                                        OCT. 14, 2014

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During a tense discussion, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank president, spoke sharply to Dr. Margaret Chan, the head of the World Health Organization, the agency in charge. You have the authority to act in this emergency, he told her, according to people familiar with the meeting, “so why aren’t you doing it?”

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Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg Kicks in $25 Million for Ebola

NBC NEWS                                                            OCT. 14, 2014

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife announced Tuesday they are donating $25 million to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control foundation to fight the Ebola crisis that has killed more than 4,440 people in west Africa.

"We need to get Ebola under control in the near term so that it doesn't spread further and become a long term global health crisis that we end up fighting for decades at large scale, like HIV or polio," Zuckerberg, who is worth $32 billion, said in a Facebook post. "We believe our grant is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field to prevent this outcome."

The health agency has hundreds of staffers working on Ebola and has sent more than 100 experts to the virus zone — Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. The CDC foundation collects funds for supplies, such as personal protective equipment, ready-to-eat meals, generators, vehicles and motorcycles, and thermal scanners to detect fever.

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WHO: Ebola spreading in W. Africa, threatens Ivory Coast; some areas see fewer cases

THE WASHINGTON POST
By Joel Achenbach                                                  October 14 at 9:15 AM

The World Health Organization issued a mixed report Tuesday on progress in the fight against the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, noting that the number of new cases is dropping in some areas that had been hit hard by the virus earlier this year. But the disease is spreading across a broader geographical region, including along the Ivory Coast border, and continues to be rampant in some capital cities.

Ebola is killing 70 percent of the people who become infected, said Bruce Aylward, WHO assistant director-general overseeing the organization’s response to the West Africa epidemic. In a conference call with journalists, he said the official statistics do not capture the true lethality of the virus.

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‘A teenage girl bled to death over two days’: Ebola nurses describe life and death on the frontline

An Ebola health worker is decontaminated at a Médecins sans Frontières unit in Monrovia in Liberia.
Photograph: Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty Images

theguardian.com - by Bridget Mulrooney, Sue Ellen Kovack and Anine Kongelf - October 13, 2014

Bridget Mulrooney, 36
American nurse working for the International Medical Corps in Bong County, Liberia

I was working as a travel nurse at a children’s hospital in California when I got an email from International Medical Corps asking if I was interested in deploying to Liberia to help fight Ebola. I wanted to go immediately but I was locked into a contract at the time. The more I heard, the more excited I got.

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Ebola outbreak threatens peace, security, WHO chief says

GENEVA — The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is “unquestionably the most severe acute public health emergency in modern times,” Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, said Monday.

Chan, who dealt with the 2009 avian flu pandemic and the SARS outbreaks of 2002-03, said the Ebola outbreak had progressed from a public health crisis to “a crisis for international peace and security.”

“I have never seen a health event threaten the very survival of societies and governments in already very poor countries,” she said in a statement delivered on her behalf to a conference in Manila, Philippines, and released by her office in Geneva. “I have never seen an infectious disease contribute so strongly to potential state failure.”

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WHO and Partners agree on a common approach to strengthen Ebola preparedness in unaffected countries

Brazzaville, 10 October 2014 - The World Health Organization (WHO) and partner organizations meeting in Brazzaville have agreed on a range of core actions to support countries unaffected by Ebola in strengthening their preparedness in the event of an outbreak.

Building on national and international existing preparedness efforts, a set of tools is being developed to help any country to intensify and accelerate their readiness.

One of these tools is a comprehensive checklist of core principles, standards, capacities and practices, which all countries should have or meet. The checklist can be used by countries to assess their level of preparedness, guide their efforts to strengthen themselves and to request assistance. Items on the checklist include infection prevention control, contact tracing, case management, surveillance, laboratory capacity, safe burial, public awareness and community engagement and national legislation and regulation to support country readiness.

“While we rightly focus on stopping the outbreak in affected countries, we should not forget that all other countries are at risk, albeit at varying levels”, said WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Luis Sambo.

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Tweets About Ebola - NowTrending.HHS.gov

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Family Identifies Ebola Patient

wfaa.com - by marjorie Owens - October 13, 2014

DALLAS — A Dallas nurse diagnosed with the Ebola virus over the weekend is a former Texas Christian University student identified by a family member as 26-year-old Nina Pham.

The family reached out to News 8 Monday morning and shared an image of the nurse who grew up in Fort Worth.

A health care worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, Pham became infected while treating Thomas Eric Duncan, who died from the virus days before the nurse's diagnosis.

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Ebola Vaccine Would Likely Have Been Found By Now If Not For Budget Cuts: NIH Director

HUFFINGTON POST

By Sam Stein                                                              Updated Oct. 13 ,2014

BETHESDA, Md. -- As the federal government frantically works to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and as it responds to a second diagnosis of the disease at home, one of the country's top health officials says a vaccine likely would have already been discovered were it not for budget cuts.

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has "slowed down" research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.

"NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and thought, 'Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'" Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."

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Hospitals should ‘think Ebola,’ CDC director says

CDC: U.S. has to rethink the way it addresses Ebola infection control

ASSOCIATED PRESS                                                            Oct. 13, 2014

By Connie Cass

DALLAS --Every hospital must know how to diagnose Ebola in people who have been in West Africa and be ready to isolate a suspected case, Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday.

He said the CDC is working to improve protections for hospital workers after a nurse caring for an Ebola patient in Dallas became the first person to become infected with the disease inside the U.S.

‘‘We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control,’’ Frieden said, ‘‘because even a single infection is unacceptable.’’

The CDC is scrambling to interview all staff of the Dallas hospital who could have been exposed to the patient, a Liberian man who became sick after traveling to the United States and died at the hospital. Anyone at risk will be monitored, he said.

‘‘We need to consider the possibility that there could be additional cases, particularly among the health care workers who cared for the index patient’’ — the Liberian man — ‘‘when he was so ill,’’ Frieden said.

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