Home » Posts tagged 'ebola pandemic'
Tag Archives: ebola pandemic
Belgian expert: WHO messed up Ebola response – Africa – Al Jazeera English
Belgian expert: WHO messed up Ebola response – Africa – Al Jazeera English.
A Belgian scientist who helped discover Ebola in 1976 has accused the World Health Organisation (WHO) of mismanaging the current outbreak response.
Peter Piot, an award-winning microbiologist, told Al Jazeera that “we wasted too much precious time”.
“It took three months for the WHO to find out there was an Ebola outbreak. That I understand. Guinea had a poor laboratory infrastructure,” said Piot in an interview due to be aired on Saturday.
“I have much more of a problem with the fact that it took five months for WHO, for the international health regulations committee, for that’s what it is, to declare this a state of emergency.
“It took a thousand dead Africans and two Americans who were repatriated to the US because they were infected. There’s no excuse for that… It took too long.”
Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for WHO, told Al Jazeera by email that “declaring a public health emergency of international cncern is not a measure of WHO’s operational response”.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
WHO reports sharp rise in Ebola deaths – Africa – Al Jazeera English
WHO reports sharp rise in Ebola deaths – Africa – Al Jazeera English.
The death toll from the worst Ebola outbreak on record has reached nearly 7,000 in West Africa, according to the World Health Organisation.
The toll of 6,928 dead showed a leap of just over 1,200 since the WHO released its previous report on Wednesday, according to a Reuters news agency report.
The UN health agency did not provide any explanation for the abrupt increase, but the figures, published on its website, appeared to include previously unreported deaths.
A WHO spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
Just over 16,000 people have been diagnosed with Ebola since the outbreak was confirmed in the forests of remote southeastern Guinea in March, according to the WHO data that covered the three hardest-hit countries.
Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia have accounted for all but 15 of the deaths in the outbreak, which has touched five other countries, according to previous WHO figures.
In a separate development, Sierra Leone will soon see a dramatic increase in desperately needed treatment beds, but it is not clear who will staff them, a top UN official in the fight against the disease has said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Ebola in Brooklyn? FDNY arrives in Hazmat suits as woman drops dead | Daily Mail Online
Ebola in Brooklyn? FDNY arrives in Hazmat suits as woman drops dead | Daily Mail Online.
- The FDNY activated their Special Operations and Hazmat units in response to a death in Brooklyn on Tuesday afternoon
- A woman who dropped dead at Amy Professional Hair Braidig had blood ‘coming from her face, nose and mouth’ said an eyewitness
- The woman had recently traveled from Guinea three weeks ago, and was being monitored for Ebola said a worker at the salon
- She was at the salon visiting the owner and was said to have died of a heart attack said the same worker
- An Ebola test will be run on her remains ‘out of an abundance of caution,’ and results will be available by Wednesday morning
- The woman, who was being checked daily, had not shown any symptoms of the deadly virus according to the New York City Health Department
» Former FDA Official: Larger Ebola Outbreaks Coming to American Cities Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind!
Former FDA official Scott Gottlieb M.D. warns that larger and more frequent Ebola outbreaks will inevitably hit American cities in the near future and that hundreds of people could be forcibly quarantined by health authorities.
In an op-ed for Forbes, Gottlieb, who previously served as Director of Medical Policy Development for the Food and Drug Administration, writes that the imminent onset of the flu season will make it harder to keep tabs on potential Ebola victims in the United States.
Sometime in January or February – as the Ebola epidemic explodes out of West Africa – we’ll start experiencing larger, more frequent outbreaks in American cities. With the flu as a background to confound suspected cases of Ebola, public health departments will be hard pressed to “track and trace” all of the potential “contacts” when perhaps dozens of Ebola cases pop up in their cities.
Unable to pinpoint who might have come in close contact with Ebola, and be at risk of contracting the virus, they will reach for their most absolute tool – forced quarantine – as a way to mitigate threat amidst uncertainty. The number of people who will be placed into forced quarantines could easily number in the hundreds.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Ebola Jumps Around the World | Environment News Service
Ebola Jumps Around the World | Environment News Service.
NEW YORK, New York, October 24, 2014 (ENS) – The worst Ebola outbreak in history, which began in West Africa in March, is traveling around the world. On Thursday, a New York City emergency room doctor who worked with Ebola patients in Guinea was diagnosed with the disease and is quarantined in hospital in New York.
Today the first case appeared in the West African country of Mali.
This week two African countries – Senegal and Nigeria – were declared Ebola-free. The World Health Organization said, “The most important lesson for the world at large is this: an immediate, broad-based, and well-coordinated response can stop the Ebola virus, carried into a country in an infected traveller, dead in its tracks.”
Of the 9,936 Ebola cases reported as of October 19 to the World Health Organization, 4,877 people have died.
The survivors include an infected nurse who cared for the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States. Today, Nina Pham, 26, was released from the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where she was treated, with a clean bill of health. She went to the White House to meet with President Barack Obama before returning home to Dallas.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As Ebola Cases Top 10,000, Obama Says America Can “Beat” The Deadly Virus | Zero Hedge
As Ebola Cases Top 10,000, Obama Says America Can “Beat” The Deadly Virus | Zero Hedge.
Following the sad death of its first Ebola case, Mali’s President has said he will not close his nation’s border with Guinea, because “the incident showed it was impossible to completely seal his country.”
Mali’s neighbors, on the other hand, are shutting borders, as Mauritania tries not to become Africa’s 7th Ebola-infected country. This brings, according to The WHO, the number of cases of Ebola to 10,141 with 4,922 dead (so far).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Top Scientist: This Version Of Ebola Looks Like ‘A Very Different Bug’
Top Scientist: This Version Of Ebola Looks Like ‘A Very Different Bug’.
Barack Obama and the head of the CDC need to quit saying that we know exactly how Ebola spreads. Because the truth is that there is much about this virus that we simply do not know. For example, a top Ebola scientist that is working in the heart of the outbreak in Liberia says that this version of Ebola looks like it could be “a very different bug” from past versions. Other leading scientists are echoing his concerns. And yet Barack Obama and Thomas Frieden continue to publicly proclaim that we know precisely how this virus behaves. Not only is that bad science, but it could also potentially result in the unnecessary deaths of a very large number of people. For example, Obama has refused to implement an Ebola travel banbecause he is greatly underestimating the seriousness of this virus. This decision could turn out to be incredibly costly. If what you will read about below is true, we could be dealing with some sort of “super Ebola” that nobody has ever seen before.
Peter Jahrling of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease is on the front lines fighting this disease in Liberia. He is one of the top authorities in the world on Ebola, and what his team has been seeing under the microscope is incredibly sobering…
…click on the link above to read the rest of the article…
The Pentagon Will Use 30 Person “Quick-Strike Team” To Deal With Domestic Ebola Patients | Zero Hedge
President Obama may have been busy golfing this weekend, and his brand new Ebola Czar may have had more pressing matters to attend than the White House’s Saturday evening meeting on the US “response to domestic Ebola cases” (because clearly the Ebola Czar is superfluous at such Ebola-related events), but that doesn’t mean that the administration will once again be caught with its pants down the next time an Ebola index patient is unveiled on US soil. Nope.
In taking a page right out of America’s response to the Ebola pandemic in… West Africa, where the US has dispatched several thousands troops to do, something, unclear what, earlier today, it was revealed that the U.S. military is forming a 30-person “quick-strike team”, which according to CNN is “equipped to provide direct treatment to Ebola patients inside the United States, a Defense Department official told CNN’s Barbara Starr on Sunday.”
