Category: Health

(Reuters)-{The Ebola outbreak in West Africa could infect 20,000 people as soon as early November unless rigorous infection control measures are implemented, and might “rumble on” for years in a holding pattern, researchers said on Tuesday.
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In an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, experts from the World Health Organization and Imperial College said that infections will continue climbing exponentially unless patients are isolated, contacts traced and communities enlisted.

The WHO, in an initial roadmap issued on Aug 28, predicted that the virus could strike 20,000 people within the next nine months. The current death toll is at least 2,811 out of 5,864 cases, the U.N. agency says.

The latest study, marking six months from March 23, when the WHO says it was informed of the Ebola outbreak in southeastern Guinea, reflects projections based on the data from a third wave of the virus in Guinea, Sierra Leone and worst-hit Liberia.

“With exponential growth, you’ll see that the case numbers per week go up so that by the second of November, over these three countries our best estimate is over 20,000 cases, confirmed and suspected cases,” Dr. Christopher Dye, the WHO director of strategy, and co-author of article, told a briefing.

Nearly 10,000 of those would be in Liberia, 5,000 in Sierra Leone and nearly 6,000 in Guinea, he said. But those numbers would only come about with no enhanced infection control.

“Everyone is certainly working very hard to make sure this is a not the reality that we will be seeing,” Dye said. “I will be surprised if we hit 20,000 by then,” he later added.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said last week that under a $1 billion plan, he will create a special mission to combat the disease and deployed staff to the region.

“If control is completely successful in the way that we know it can be, then Ebola will disappear from the human population of West Africa and probably return to its animal reservoir,” Dye said, noting that fruit bats were probably the reservoir.

But if control efforts are only partly successful, Ebola viral disease in the human population could become “a permanent feature of life in West Africa”, Dye said.

“The alternative possibility that we’re talking about is that the epidemic simply rumbles on as it has for the last few months for the next few years, on the order of years, rather than months.

“Under those circumstances, the fear is that Ebola will be more or less a permanent feature of the human population. Of course it could be extinguished later on.”

In the three hardest-hit countries there was a “mixed pattern”, Dye said.

“We see for example in the border areas of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, some areas where there has been no increase in cases for some weeks now. That’s true in Sierra Leone, it’s true in Lofa in northern Liberia, and it’s true in one of the provinces of Guinea.

“So the question that arises is whether we’re actually seeing the beginning of a stationary pattern in this epidemic.

In two badly affected districts of Sierra Leone, Kenema and Kailahun, close to border areas with Guinea and Liberia, there has been a stationary pattern, he said.

“What we’ve seen in the past weeks there, maybe eight, nine, 10 weeks now, is a pattern of incidence, numbers of cases per week, which has not significantly changed.

“And indeed there are signs that it’s going down. And I say that cautiously, because we’re prepared to be surprised again. That is what I mean by stationary pattern. A steady incidence week on week.”

There are other reassuring signs about the efficacy of infection control measures, he said, but whether the disease’s spread was stabilising would become clear in the next few weeks.

No new cases have been recorded in either Nigeria or Senegal in the last three weeks, corresponding to the 21-day incubation period for developing the virulent virus, whose symptoms include fever, vomiting and diarrhoea.

“It is reassuring in many ways that a disease like Ebola can enter a city of 20 million, namely Lagos, and we are able to stop transmission, or rather the people of Nigeria are able to stop transmission,” Dye said.

But the Liberian capital Monrovia, where the disease has recently spread fastest, was “uncharted territory”, he said.

“Quite honestly if you ask ‘can we stamp Ebola out of Liberia?’ I’m not sure. In principle we know how to do it, but can we do it on the ground? It remains to be seen.”

{Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC) on Tuesday opened a standard laboratory to control the spread of malaria and other parasitic diseases.
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The laboratory will help Rwanda to test new insecticides for indoor spraying, and perform other new findings on the species of mosquitoes and appropriate drugs.

Located in the Kigali University School of Public Health of Rwanda, this laboratory has cost about $ 400,000.

The entomology laboratory will provide the necessary elements to provide a basis for policy formulation and strategic decisions in Rwanda and as well as in the region.

The results will be more reliable because the lab will identify mosquitoes through DNA testing and not just a microscope.

So far, nine species of mosquitoes have been identified

About 67% of mosquitoes feed on humans while others feed on animals, according to studies.

The laboratory will also be used to test the effectiveness of drugs, including sprays used for malaria control, to ensure that people are not deceived by counterfeit drugs.

{The Kenyan capital Nairobi will host an emergency East African Community meeting on the Ebola crisis later this month, EAC Secretary General Richard Sezibera has announced.
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He told Tuesday afternoon’s session of the East African Legislative Assembly in Dar es Salaam that the plan is for the regional bloc to come up with concrete ideas on how to “quickly and effectively” contain the spread of deadly disease that has killed nearly 2,000 people, mainly in West Africa.

The disease, which was first reported in Guinea before spreading to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Democratic Republic of Congo, has since seen been declared an international crisis.

According to Dr Sezibera, the meeting is lined up for September 17 and will involve the health and transport ministers and experts from all the five EAC partner states and neighbouring countries as well as World Health Organisation officials.

In earlier remarks in the House, he said the East African Community Civil Aviation Safety and Security Oversight Agency (CASSOA) has already hosted an emergency meeting in Entebbe, Uganda, on what could be a common approach to Ebola threat in the EAC region.

“I will be in good position to tell this House what the measures that the Community has agreed to put in place are, but that will be after the meeting set for Nairobi,” he said.

He made the remarks in response to a report tabled by Angela Kizigha, a Tanzania EALA member who chairs the House committee on communication, trade and investment in the EAC aviation sector.

The House also heard Ugandan EALA member Suzan Nakawuki moved a motion for a resolution urging the EAC Council of Ministers to put in place measures to “handle and manage the Ebola outbreak” in the region.

IPP Media

{{Oregon researchers developing a vaccine that has shown promise in preventing HIV infection in primates said on Wednesday they have been awarded a $25 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.}}

Oregon Health & Science University scientists, in announcing the award, said they hope to develop a vaccine that not only prevents the HIV virus from infecting people exposed to it, but also eliminates the virus from those already infected.

The grant follows research published by the scientists seeking to show their vaccine candidate halting the transmission of, or eliminating altogether, a form of the virus in about half of more than 100 monkeys tested.

“In effect, we helped better arm the hunters in the body to chase down and kill an elusive viral enemy,” lead researcher Louis Picker wrote in the magazine Nature, which published lab results last year.

“And we’re quite confident that this vaccine approach can work exactly the same way against HIV in humans.”

While the annual number of new HIV infections has declined in recent years, more than 35 million people globally were living with HIV and an estimated 2.1 million people were newly infected with the virus that causes AIDS last year, according to the World Health Organization.

Although AIDS-related deaths have dropped in recent years due to antiretroviral drug therapy, some 1.5 million people still died from the disease last year, the organization said.

In the United States, the annual rate of diagnosis with HIV fell by a third between 2002 and 2011, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

{additional reporting Reuters}

{{Canada’s experimental Ebola vaccine was stuck in the government lab that developed it as officials puzzled over how to safely transport it, three weeks after it was offered to Africa to fight the deadly epidemic.}}

Ottawa said on Aug. 12 that it would donate between 800 and 1,000 doses of the vaccine to the World Health Organization for use in Africa, where more than 1,900 people have died from the disease. The vaccines are being held at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

“We are now working with the WHO to address complex regulatory, logistical and ethical issues so that the vaccine can be safely and ethically deployed as rapidly as possible,” said Health Canada spokesman Sean Upton said in a statement.

“For example, the logistics surrounding the safe delivery of the vaccine are complicated.”

One challenge is keeping the vaccine cool enough to remain potent, Upton said.

Canadian officials were trying to define proper storage and transportation procedures, and they could not estimate when the vaccines would leave the lab.

Cases of Ebola have been reported in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal, and Democratic Republic of Congo. The cases in Congo, which include 31 deaths, are thought to be a separate outbreak and not related to the West African cases.

The United Nations said on Wednesday it would take $600 million in supplies to control an outbreak of Ebola in West Africa as the death toll rose from the worst epidemic of the virus on record.

reuters

{{World leaders must immediately deploy civilian and military medical teams to fight the world’s biggest outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, the head of an international medical charity said in New York on Tuesday}}.

The international response has so far relied on overstretched health ministries and nongovernmental organisations to tackle the exceptionally large outbreak of the disease, Medecins sans Frontieres President Joanne Liu told U.N. member states at their New York headquarters.

Liu accused world leaders of “failing to come to grips with this transnational threat,” and said they had “essentially joined a global coalition of inaction,” despite the World Health Organisation’s Aug. 8 announcement that the epidemic constituted a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’

Her remarks followed World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s declaration on Monday that many people were dying unnecessarily from a “disastrously inadequate response” to the disease and that wealthy nations ought to share their knowledge and resources to help African countries.

Ebola is a haemorrhagic virus for which there is currently no widely available vaccine or cure. Since the outbreak began in March, more than 3,000 people have been infected in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Senegal and half of them have died.

The WHO set out a ‘road map’ last week on how to fight the outbreak. The virus, spread through direct contact with infected tissues and fluids, could infect up to 20,000 people and cost $490 million to control over the next six months, it said.

The MSF said transmission rates had reached levels never reported in past Ebola outbreaks, and NGOs and the United Nations could not alone implement the WHO Global Road Map to fight the spreading and unpredictable outbreak.

Any military assets and personnel sent to the region should not be used for quarantine, containment, or crowd control measures because forced quarantines have created fear and unrest, rather than stem the spread of the virus, MSF said.