Posts
I
have, once again, to express my gratitude to Alvin
Conway and the Extinction Protocol for giving such full and balanced
coverage of this.
Global
panic only just beginning: suspect cases popping up all over the
globe
October
2014 – HEALTH – A
person in Quebec with symptoms of the Ebola virus is being treated in
a hospital in Abitibi-Témiscamingue. According to the regional
health and social services agency, the patient was recently in
contact with people who may have been exposed to Ebola. “I have to
highlight that our suspicion is very weak,” said Dr. Éric
Lampron-Goulet, a regional public health official. “We did a test
out of precaution.” Lampron-Goulet said the patient has a fever and
that, combined with having contact with West African travelers, is
sufficient to merit tests. He said the patient has been isolated
while the tests are underway. Tests have been sent to the public
health laboratory in Quebec and results are expected within 24 to 36
hours. He also said Quebec’s health system is prepared for Ebola is
following the procedure for treating suspicious cases. –CBC
Brazil: Fears
are growing that the deadly Ebola virus has hit a new continent as a
missionary in Brazil undergoes tests for the infection. If the
Brazilian case is confirmed, it would mean the disease has spread to
South America for the first time. The suspected patient is a
47-year-old man from Guinea, one of the African countries that have
been ravaged by the disease. He has been described in local media as
a missionary and he was taken in an air force plane from the southern
state of Parana to the National Infectious Disease Institute in Rio
de Janeiro on Friday morning. It came after he arrived at a health
centre in the town of Cascavel with a fever the previous afternoon.
The health ministry said today that the patient was ‘in good shape’
and his slight fever had now subsided. Minister Arthur Chioro noted
that the patient had been in Brazil for the maximum incubation period
for the Ebola virus of 21 days. The result of a test for the virus
should be available by early Saturday, he said. –Mail
Czech republic: Czech
Republic registers its first case of suspected Ebola, who returned
from Liberia 22 days ago, Czech chief sanitary officer Vladimir
Valenta said Thursday. The man, 56, has fever but no other Ebola
symptoms, and was in isolation at Prague’s Na Bulovce hospital,
Xinhua quoted Valenta as saying. (Read: Ebola facts — frequently
asked questions (FAQ))‘As the only symptom has been fever so far,
we hope that it might be another disease, for instance, malaria,’
he said, adding that all people whom the patient has met since his
return are being checked. Hospital sources said the results of tests
conducted are expected Friday. –Health
Site
France: A
French woman has been hospitalized with Ebola-like symptoms, which
she was suspected of contracting while in Liberia. The patient was
being confined in an isolation ward at Bichat Hospital in Paris,
Xinhua cited news channel BFMTV as saying Friday. A building at
Cergy-Pontoise in Paris northern suburbs was sealed off Thursday
evening after two men of African origin had developed Ebola symptoms,
including fever, muscle pain, vomiting and bleeding. However, the two
men tested negative. On Sep 19, a French nurse working with Medecins
Sans Frontieres (MSF) returned home after being infected with Ebola
virus during a mission in Liberia. The nurse, the first Ebola case
reported in France, left hospital last weekend. She was hospitalized
in Begin Military Hospital near Paris where she received
“experimental treatment.” Since March the Ebola outbreak in West
Africa has killed more than 3,865 people and infected more than 7,400
others, according to the latest report of the World Health
Organization (WHO). –Business
Standard
Canada
advises citizens to leave Ebola-hit countries: The
Canadian government advised its citizens to leave the West African
countries hardest hit by Ebola, while taking measures at its own
borders to screen for potentially exposed travelers. “We are asking
Canadians living in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia to consider
leaving by commercial means while they are still available,” Health
Minister Rona Ambrose said on Friday. The minister also said that
anyone traveling to Canada from the countries affected by the
epidemic will be screened at airports. Ambrose stressed that “the
risk to Canadians here at home is very low,” but said, as a
precaution, quarantine officers will check those who may have been
exposed to the hemorrhagic virus for fever and “determine whether
additional public health measures are required.”
The
West African Ebola outbreak erupted at the beginning of the year,
killing nearly 4,000 people so far — roughly half of those
infected. This week saw the first Ebola death in the United States,
while a nurse in Spain is fighting for her life after being infected
while treating an Ebola patient who died. The disease causes fever,
diarrhea, vomiting and in some cases internal and external bleeding.
It is spread by contact and the exchange of bodily fluids. –Yahoo
News
Liberia:
41 UN staffers under observation for Ebola
October 2014 – AFRICA – Liberia’s United Nations peacekeeping mission has placed 41 staff members, including 20 military personnel, under “close medical observation” after an international member of its medical team was diagnosed with Ebola this week — the second mission member to test positive for the deadly disease. “This measure is precautionary and meant to ensure no possible further transmission of the disease,” the mission said in a statement Friday. “None of the personnel who are contacts have shown any symptoms but will be observed for the full 21-day possible incubation period.” The World Health Organization says 21 days is the maximum incubation period for Ebola, which is spread via the bodily fluids of infected people. The 41 staffers were identified as having possibly come into contact with the member of the medical team, whose name and nationality have not been disclosed.
The
patient tested positive Monday and arrived in Germany Thursday for
treatment — the third Ebola patient to be flown there. The St.
Georg Hospital in Leipzig said this week the patient would be placed
in a special isolation unit. The first U.N. staffer in Liberia to
come down with Ebola died Sept. 26. The mission is implementing
additional measures to avoid more cases, including daily temperature
checks and screening at a military facility where 209 people work,
Friday’s statement said. Liberia has recorded 2,316 confirmed,
suspected and probable Ebola deaths — far more than any other
country touched by the current outbreak, according to the latest
World Health Organization figures released Friday. The outbreak has
now killed more than 4,000 people in total, the WHO said. More than
400 health care workers have contracted Ebola, and 233 of those have
died, according to the WHO. Liberia and Sierra Leone have both
recorded 95 health worker deaths. ABC
News
WHO
says Ebola spread ‘bigger than expected’ – 1,300 Nigerian
troops quarantined in Liberia after contact with Ebola patient
October
2014 – HEALTH - Leading
global health experts did not anticipate the scale of the Ebola
outbreak, a senior health official has told the BBC. Chris Dye from
the World Health Organization (WHO) said the international response
was helping but needed to continue. Ebola is now entrenched in the
capitals of the worst-affected states – Guinea, Liberia and Sierra
Leone, WHO says. The outbreak has killed more than 3,860 people,
mainly in West Africa. More than 200 health workers are among the
victims. Mr. Dye said that that although no-one was in a position to
anticipate the scale of the current outbreak; the important thing was
to look forward. “We’ve asked for a response of about $1bn
(£618m); so far we have around $300m (£185m) with more being
pledged, so a bit less than half of what we need but it’s climbing
quickly all the time,” he said. In April, the medical charity
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) warned of the potential spread of the
virus, but the WHO played down the claims, saying that Ebola was
neither an epidemic, nor was it unprecedented. On Friday MSF reported
a sharp increase of Ebola cases in the Guinean capital, Conakry,
dashing hopes that the disease was being stabilized there. Meanwhile
in Mali, an experimental serum is being tested on volunteer health
workers.
The
trial spans several countries, and the results will be sent to
experts to determine whether it is able to protect against Ebola.
Meanwhile in Spain, seven more people are being monitored in hospital
for Ebola. They include two hairdressers who came into contact with
Teresa Romero, a Madrid nurse who looked after an Ebola patient who
had been repatriated from West Africa. Ms Romero is now reported to
be gravely ill but stable. Nigeria’s military has now confirmed
that more than 1,300 Nigerian peacekeeping troops have been
quarantined in Liberia after coming into contact with a Sudanese man
who later died of the disease. It had earlier denied such reports.
–BBC
Treatment
centers full- stay at home: Acknowledging
a major “defeat” in the fight against Ebola,
international health officials battling the epidemic in Sierra Leone
approved plans on Friday to help families treat patients at home,
recognizing that
they are overwhelmed and have little chance of getting enough
treatment beds in place quickly to meet the surging need.
The decision signifies a significant shift in the struggle against
the rampaging disease. Officials said they would begin distributing
painkillers, rehydrating solution and gloves to hundreds of
Ebola-afflicted households in Sierra Leone, contending that the aid
arriving here was not fast or extensive enough to keep up with an
outbreak that doubles in size every month or so. “It’s basically
admitting defeat,” said Peter H. Kilmarx, the leader of the federal
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s team in Sierra Leone,
adding that it was “now national policy that we should take care of
these people at home.” “For the clinicians it’s admitting
failure, but we are responding to the need,” Dr. Kilmarx said.
“There are hundreds of people with Ebola that we are not able to
bring into a facility.”
The
effort to prop up a family’s attempts to care for ailing relatives
at home does not mean that officials have abandoned plans to increase
the number of beds in hospitals and clinics. But before the beds can
be added and doctors can be trained, experts warn, the epidemic will
continue to grow. C.D.C. officials acknowledged that the risks of
dying from the disease and passing it to loved ones at home were
serious under the new policy — “You push some Tylenol to them,
and back away,” Mr. Kilmarx said, describing it’s obvious limits.
But many patients with Ebola are already dying slowly at home,
untreated and with no place to go. So officials said there was little
choice but to try the new approach as well. “For the first time,
the nation is accepting the possibility of home care, out of
necessity,” said Jonathan Mermin, another C.D.C. official and
physician here. “It is a policy out of necessity.” –NY
Times
Ebola
is becoming a global pandemic: new reported cases worldwide
October
2014 – HEALTH – Despite
several confident exclamations from officials that the Ebola pandemic
is contained, there are more and more reports of possible or
confirmed infections.
Several nations are admitting to have
Ebola-symptomatic cases or that they are bringing infected patients
back from Africa for treatment. New reports of possible infections
are coming from Australia, Turkey, Brazil and France.
Furthermore,
health officials in Germany confirmed that a 3rd infected patient
arrived into the country. Bloomberg is reporting that a nurse,
Sue-Ellen Kovack, who returned from volunteering in Africa, has
developed Ebola-like symptoms. Kovack treated the infected patients
with the Red Cross in Sierra Leone and after she developed a
low-grade fever, she was hospitalized in Australia.
She is being
tested for Ebola and this means that Australia now has its first
potential case of the deadly disease. Even though several people and
officials say that the Nigeria’s outbreak is over, a Turkish worker
has been hospitalized in Istanbul, after he started showing signs of
high fever and diarrhea.
The
46-year-old man, whose identity has not been revealed yet, returned
from Africa 11 days ago to see his family during the Feast of the
Sacrifice holiday. After a Nigerian woman was tested negative in
mid-August, this is now the second case of a suspected Ebola patient
in Turkey. Health officials from Germany confirmed that a 3rd
infected patient arrived into the country on Thursday. The man, who
comes from Sudan, contracted the disease in Liberia and he has been
transported from the airport to the St. Georg Clinic in Leipzig,
which is located about 125 miles (200 kilometers) southeast of
Berlin.
Two other Ebola patients in Germany were also flown back from
Africa and a World Health Organization (WHO) employee, who had fallen
ill with the hemorrhagic fever in Sierra Leone, was successfully
stabilized and released from the hospital last week.
Fears are also
growing in Brazil, since a possible Ebola patient was flown in an air
force plane from Parana to the National Infectious Disease Institute
in Rio de Janeiro on Friday morning. The possible infected patient,
who is still being tested for the deadly virus, is a 47-year-old man
from Guinea, one of the African countries that has been highly
affected by the disease. In case that he comes back positive, this
would mean that the virus has spread to South America for the first
time.
France
also reported about a possible infected person, since an unidentified
woman from Paris has been placed in sterilized isolation after
showing Ebola-like symptoms.
Despite all efforts to contain this
deadly virus, there are several new reports of its spreading. Ebola
case was already confirmed in Senegal, Spain and in the United
States.
The first person that was diagnosed with the virus in the
U.S., was Tomas Duncan, who died on Wednesday morning in the Texas
Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas.
Just like the nurse from
Spain, Duncan also went untreated and un-quarantined for a week,
despite reporting his symptoms. It looks like the world is
ill-prepared for the possible global Ebola pandemic. –Guardian
Ebola:
‘We’re at an absolute tipping point,’ warns former UK Foreign
Secretary David Miliband
October
2014 – AFRICA - David
Miliband, the former British foreign secretary, warned that the Ebola
outbreak means that years of social and economic progress in Sierra
Leone was at risk, as he visited the country’s capital Freetown.
Miliband, who is now the head of the International Rescue Committee
which has about 500 staff working in Liberia and Sierra Leone to
combat Ebola, told the Guardian that this was a crucial moment and
that treatment alone would not stop the death toll. He was in
Freetown to thank and support the 330 staff there, he said, and to
advocate for the people.
“After 10 years of pretty sustained
progress, all that progress is now at stake,” he told the Guardian.
“One of the things that have become starkly clear to me in my visit
is that there’s no grey area here between controlling the disease
on the one hand and widespread disaster on the other.
We’re at an
absolute tipping point where either the disease is contained to the
low tens of thousands, or it becomes an epidemic of a very serious
kind.” Miliband was speaking as anxiety in the UK mounted over the
possibility that there could be cases in the country. Asked if he
felt brave for flying into the outbreak, he said:
“I don’t think
the leader of an NGO can call himself brave for going somewhere when
300 staff of his organization is working here every day. If it’s
safe enough for my staff, it’s safe enough for me.
“There are no
grounds for panic,” he added. “This is a hard disease to catch.
It requires the exchange of body fluids. But there’s no reason not
to take sensible precautions.”
In
West Africa, there
were three steps to controlling Ebola, he said. The first was prompt
identification of people who have the disease. Some who have symptoms
will have malaria or other diseases instead.
The second is isolation
and safe treatment for those who have the virus – safe for the
health workers.
One of the tragedies was that they had lost a higher
proportion of health workers than civilians. The third, he said, is
the quick and safe disposal of the dead. His organization has been
leading the nine-partner Ebola Response Consortium in Sierra Leone
and supporting surveillance teams and working with community leaders.
It will open a 100-bed treatment centre in Liberia in November.
However, treatment alone is not the answer, he said. “One of the
things that I think is very important is that, although there’s
been a lot of international attention on the number of treatment
beds, we will never catch up with the disease simply by focusing on
treatment beds.
The absolute key is to stop the chain of
transmission, which means local engagement, house by house, community
by community, street by street, explaining to local people what the
dangers are and how they can mitigate them. That’s an absolute
priority if this disease is not to get out of control.”
There
needs to be a clear plan now that all organizations involved can
support, Miliband said. “John Kerry said we need a global plan to a
global crisis. He’s right but without a local response that is
community led and that is trusted by the local people, then however
much money we throw at treatment centers, we’re not going to be
able to get hold of the disease. At the moment the spread of the
disease is outstripping the expansion of the treatment.” –Guardian
Fears
mount ‘it will be impossible’ to stop Ebola outbreak as death
toll climbs
October
2014 – HEALTH - The
UN special envoy on Ebola says the number of cases is probably
doubling every three-to-four weeks and the response needs to be 20
times greater than it was at the beginning of October to control the
rapid advance of the deadly virus.
David Nabarro warned the UN
General Assembly that without the mass mobilization of virtually
every country, all donor organizations and many non-governmental
groups to support the affected countries in West Africa, “it will
be impossible to get this disease quickly under control, and the
world will have to live with the Ebola virus forever.”
Nabarro, who
is the Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Ebola Virus
Disease, said in his 35 years as a public health doctor dealing with
many disease outbreaks and some pandemics he has never encountered a
challenge like Ebola because the outbreak has moved from rural areas
into towns and cities and is now “affecting a whole region and…
impacting on the whole world.”
He
said the United Nations, which is coordinating the global response,
knows what needs to be done to catch up to and overtake Ebola’s
rapid advance, “and together we’re going to do it. And our
commitment to all of you is to achieve it within a matter of months –
a few months,” Nabarro told diplomats from most of the 193 UN
member states.
UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson appealed “to
all member states to act generously and swiftly. Speed is of the
essence. A contribution within days is more important than a larger
contribution within weeks.”
The comments come as the World Health
Organization (WHO) revealed that 4,033 people have died in the
outbreak – all but nine of them in the three worst-affected
countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. WHO, the Geneva-based UN
agency, says that, as of the end of Wednesday, a total of 8,399
confirmed, probable and suspected cases of Ebola had been reported
from seven countries. -TVNZ
Suspected
case of Ebola virus
in Abitibi-Témiscamingue
26
January, 2013
MONTREAL
— Quebec’s public health agency has
confirmed that
there is a suspected case of Ebola in
the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region of the province
The agency confirmed
that a patient is showing symptoms suggestive of the
virus, and has a history of contact with travellers from one of
the affected countries in West Africa.
A
sample has been sent for analysis to both the Laboratoire de santé
publique du Québec and to the National Microbiology Lab in
Winnipeg.
Results
are expected in 24-36 hours.
“We
think that the person could have been affected, but the risk is very
low,” Eric Lampron-Goulet, a public health specialist from
Quebec, told Global News.
He
said that the patient did not travel in West Africa, but had contact
with someone who did.
The
patient will remain in the region until the results of the test are
confirmed. If the results are positive, the person will be
transferred to the CHUM Hospital in Montreal.
“Even
if we think that the person has low-risk for infection, we use
the same measures that we would use if the person tested positive,”
Lampron-Goulet said.
Health
workers treating the patient will wear a mask, eye shields
and protective gear for the entire body, including the feet.
There
have been three other suspected cases of Ebola in Quebec, all of
which tested negative.
Quebec’s
health agency said is was important to remember that there have been
no confirmed cases of Ebola in Quebec or in Canada to date. If a
positive result is confirmed, an official announcement will be
made by the public health authorities.
The
World Health Organization said Friday that the number of deaths
recorded in theEbola
outbreak has
risen above 4,000 and a total of 8,399 confirmed, probable and
suspected cases of Ebola had been reported from seven countries.
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