Emergency Management

HOMELAND SECURITY TODAY               Oct. 9, 2014

 By Kylie Bull, Managing Editor

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has developed a dynamic modeling tool called Ebola Response that allows for estimations of projected cases over time in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

 The Ebola Response modeling tool can construct scenarios to illustrate how control and prevention interventions can slow and eventually stop the Ebola epidemic. Importantly, it can help public health and other planners make more informed decisions about emergency response resources to help bring the outbreak under control. The new tool allows input of data reflective of the current situation on the ground in affected countries and communities.

 The Ebola Response modeling tool is intended to help local governments and international responders generate short-term estimates of the Ebola situations in countries, districts and villages. The tool, in the form of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, is to be made freely available online.

Meanwhile, in Liberia, the World Health Organization (WHO) has established a new training program for health workers on Ebola care.

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cnn.com - October 1, 2014

CNN's Jake Tapper speaks to Gavin Macgregor-Skinner and Jeffery Stern. With the first Ebola diagnosis in the U.S., is the country prepared to handle a potential outbreak?

http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2014/10/01/only-four-u-s-hospitals-prepared-for-outbreak/

rt.com - Sep 22, 2014

While the world is preoccupied with Islamic State or political games around Ukraine, there’s another threat emerging from the West Africa - where people are dying by hundreds, reaped by the deadliest Ebola epidemic to be ever known to mankind. Efforts to contain it end in a failure, and the vaccine is nonexistent yet. Are we seeing another pandemic slowly growing up to strike at mankind? What should be done to stop it? What does it mean to be a doctor in a place where death reigns? We try to find out this together with the head of the Médecins Sans Frontières - Doctors Without Borders. Dr. Joanne Liu is on Sophie&Co today.

http://rt.com/shows/sophieco/189516-west-africa-ebola-threat/

Wall Street Journal     Sept. 28, 2014 8:10 PM

By Drew Hinshaw in Robertsville, Liberia, and Betsy McKay in Atlanta

The American military effort against history's deadliest Ebola outbreak is taking shape in West Africa, but concerns are mounting that the pace isn't fast enough to check a virus that is spreading at a terrifying clip.

On Saturday, a handful of troops from the Navy's 133rd Mobile Construction Battalion led a bulldozer through thigh-high grass outside Liberia's main airport, bottles of hand sanitizer dangling from their belt loops.

They had been digging a parking lot in the East African nation of Djibouti this month when they received a call to build the first of a dozen or more tent hospitals the U.S intends to construct in this region. The soldiers started by giving the land a downward slope for water runoff—"to keep out any unwanted reptiles," said Petty Officer Second Class Justin Holsinger.

While this team levels the earth, superiors hash out the still-uncertain details of the American intervention here.