An unusual respiratory virus is striking children in the metro in big numbers. Children’s Mercy Hospital is hospitalizing 20 to 30 kids a day with the virus. The hospital is as full now as it is at the height of flu season.
Water wells in central California have begun to run dry, reports the LA Times. (1) “Extreme drought conditions have become so harsh for the Central Valley community of East Porterville [that] many of its residents dependent on their own wells have run out of water.” Tulare County has confirmed their wells have run out of water, and so far hundreds of homes have no running water.
Ebola continues to spread an an exponential rate. According to the World Health Organization, 40 percent of all Ebola cases have happened in just the last three weeks. At this point, the official numbers tell us that approximately 3,500 people have gotten the virus in Africa and more than 1,900 people have died.
If there can be any good news – or at least not further disheartening news – coming out of the African continent regarding this year’s Ebola outbreaks, we have one positive report this morning. The World Health Organization has just confirmed that the newly-identified cases of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in the Democratic Republic of Congo is genetically unrelated to the strain currently circulating in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. A WHO collaborating research center in Franceville, Gabon, the Centre International de Recherches Médicales, had previously identified six Ebola positive samples sent to the laboratory.
A cricket with a voracious appetite for anything — including members of its own species — is now spreading across the eastern United States with no end to the invasion in sight. The invader, known as the greenhouse camel cricket (Diestrammena asynamora), is described in the latest issue of the journal PeerJ. “The good news is that camel crickets don’t bite or pose any kind of threat to humans,” Mary Jane Epps, a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State and lead author of the paper, said in a press release.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is “racing ahead” of efforts to control it, and controlling the epidemic will cost at least $600 million, world health officials said Wednesday. The number of people infected with Ebola has grown to 3,500, with more than 1,900 deaths, according to the World Health Organization, or WHO. “We do need a major response,” said Margaret Chan, the director-general of the WHO.
Another American doctor working for the missionary group SIM has tested positive for Ebola in Liberia. The doctor was treating pregnant women ELWA Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, according to SIM. But he was not treating Ebola patients in the hospital’s separate Ebola isolation facility, the group said, adding that it was unclear how he contracted the virus.
Writing for The Washington Post (WP), journalist Joby Warrick draws attention to what many scientists say is an unprecedented collapse of California’s vast water infrastructure, which is marked by an elaborate system of canals, reservoirs and wells that transfer water from the mountains and other areas to the Central Valley. Altogether, the state contains some 27 million acres of cropland. This system is now failing, say experts, and the consequences will more than likely be unparalleled in California’s history.
The Ebola outbreak is putting food harvests in West Africa “at serious risk”, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warns. It has raised a special alert for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three countries worst affected. Rice and maize production will be particularly affected during the coming harvest season, says the FAO.
Video has emerged of Liberian ebola clinic workers dressed in contamination suits chasing an escaped patient through the streets after he left a treatment centre to visit a market. There were chaotic scenes as crowds followed infected man, who was wearing a wristband to show he had tested positive for the disease, and some stallholders argued with him as he approached. The patient escaped from Monrovia’s Elwa hospital, which last month was so crowded with cases of the deadly disease that it had to turn people away.
The director for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention says that the Ebola outbreak is going to get worse. Speaking to “CBS This Morning” following his trip to the West African countries dealing with the outbreak, Dr. Tom Frieden explained that they have to act now to try to get Ebola under control.
Alessandro Vespignani hopes that his latest work will turn out to be wrong. In July, the physicist from Northeastern University in Boston started modeling how the deadly Ebola virus may spread in West Africa. Extrapolating existing trends, the number of the sick and dying mounts rapidly from the current toll—more than 3000 cases and 1500 deaths—to about 10,000 cases by 24 September, and hundreds of thousands in the months after that.
NASA is warning a new sunspot spewing powerful X-class flares is beginning to rotate to a position directly in line with Earth. A direct hit on Earth from an X-class flare could cause major disruptions – or even destruction – to the U.S.
At least 48 tonnes (equal to 52.9 U.S.
At the gravesite in a northern Liberia village, there are no religious or traditional burial rites. No ceremony, no mourning, no family members, and no final goodbyes. Nothing but a group of men dressed in space-suit-like outfits, cautiously throwing the dead body into the grave, they pause only to toss in anything else they are wearing that came into contact with the deceased.
For the first time, scientists have been able to follow the spread of an Ebola outbreak almost in real time, by sequencing the virus’ genome from people in Sierra Leone. The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, offer new insights into how the outbreak started in West Africa and how fast the virus is mutating. A international team of researchers sequenced 99 Ebola genomes, with extremely high accuracy, from 78 people diagnosed with Ebola in Sierra Leone in June.
Five West African Ebola researchers died from the virus before they ever saw their work in print. The Harvard University-led study, published Thursday in Science magazine, found that the virus has mutated over the course of the 2014 outbreak, which has killed more than 1,500 people since its March onset. The work emphasized that the rapid variations could make vaccine and treatment development difficult — a point further underscored by the Ebola deaths of its authors.
A man infected with Ebola traveled to Senegal, bringing to the country the first confirmed case of the dreaded disease that has hit four other West African nations and killed more than 1,500 people, the Ministry of Health said Friday. The infected person, a university student from Guinea, sought treatment at a hospital in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, on Tuesday but gave no indication he might have Ebola, Health Minister Awa Marie Coll Seck told reporters. The next day, an epidemiological surveillance team in Guinea alerted Senegalese authorities that they had lost track of a person who had had contact with sick people.
The West African Ebola outbreak took a more deadly turn Friday with the World Health Organization announcing an estimated 500 new cases this week — the biggest jump in infections so far. Most of the new cases arose in Liberia, the U.N.
Argentine ants, Linepithema humile, are on the march in drought-stricken California, and they’re invading Bay Area homes in droves. It’s considered one of the most invasive species on the planet. “The Argentine ant is a species introduced to our environment – and it has invaded our ant fauna,” said Brian Fisher, curator of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.