Today, the Ebola virus spreads only through direct contact with bodily fluids, such as blood and vomit. But some of the nation’s top infectious disease experts worry that this deadly virus could mutate and be transmitted just by a cough or a sneeze. “It’s the single greatest concern I’ve ever had in my 40-year public health career,” said Dr.
With warnings from officials that the Ebola virus is “spreading like wildfire” in Liberia, Sarah Crowe, who works for the UN children’s agency (Unicef), describes her week on the Ebola front line: Flights into disaster zones are usually full of aid workers and journalists. Not this time.
An undisclosed number of people who’ve been exposed to the Ebola virus — not just the four patients publicly identified with diagnosed cases — have been evacuated to the U.S. by an air ambulance company contracted by the State Department.
There is not a single empty bed available for an Ebola patient in Liberia right now, but thousands more cases are expected in the coming weeks. Entire families have been driving around in taxis looking for some place that will take their sick family members, but every treatment facility is already full. According to the World Health Organization, many of those potential Ebola patients end up returning to their homes where there will inevitably spread the virus to even more people.
WHO and other groups have been warning that the situation in Liberia and Sierra Leone and Guinea is dire. It’s especially bad in Liberia, WHO said Monday. “Transmission of the Ebola virus in Liberia is already intense and the number of new cases is increasing exponentially,” WHO said in a statement.
The Ebola virus is spreading exponentially in Liberia, where many thousands of new cases expected over the coming three weeks, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday. In a statement, the WHO said that motorbike-taxis and regular taxis are “a hot source of potential virus transmission” in Liberia where conventional Ebola control interventions “are not having an adequate impact”. (Read the rest of the story here…)
With the possibility of the Ebola outbreak widening in the region and eventually spanning the globe, this writer reached out to Board Certified Internal Medicine specialist Dr. Jorge Rodriguez for more information. During an interview on Saturday’s “Pure Opelka” radio program, Rodriguez, the show’s frequent medical contributor, shared some of his concerns about the latest news in the Ebola story.
One in 10 health-care workers treating Ebola patients in West Africa are becoming infected with the disease, the World Health Organization announced in Geneva Friday in an international media teleconference at the conclusion of an emergency meeting on the outbreak. The WHO invited medical experts from around the world to the two-day meeting to discuss using experimental and alternative treatments to combat the Ebola crisis, which the U.N.
A Nigerian health worker visiting Israel has been hospitalized in Jerusalem in fear that she might be infected with the Ebola virus. The woman was admitted to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center with a high fever and other symptoms that possibly indicate that she contracted the deadly strain. The hospital was conducting tests to determine if the quarantined tourist was carrying the first-seen case of Ebola in Israel.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has accelerated quickly with almost 1,000 deaths in the last month alone, according to the latest World Health Organisation figures. The United Nations is establishing an Ebola Crisis Centre with the goal of stopping transmission in affected countries within six to nine months, the UN chief said, as the death toll from the outbreak surpassed 2,000 for the first time. WHO said the number of people who have died in the outbreak has reached 2,097 across five West Africa countries, with about half the deaths in Liberia.
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.
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.
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.
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.