(101.) 6 August 2014 (Primary Source) Suspected Ebola victim dies in Saudi Arabia

A Saudi man who was being treated for Ebola-like symptoms has died at a hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia's health ministry says.

If confirmed, this would be the first Ebola-related death outside Africa in an outbreak that has killed more than 900 people this year.

The man recently visited Sierra Leone, one of four countries in the outbreak.

World Health Organization (WHO) experts are meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss a response to the outbreak.

The two-day meeting will decide whether to declare a global health emergency.

Ebola, a viral haemorrhagic fever, is one of the deadliest diseases known to humans, with a fatality rate of between 55% and 90%.

A WHO statement on Wednesday said 932 patients had died of the disease in West Africa so far, with most of the latest fatalities reported in Liberia.

A man who attended Mt Sinai hospital in New York on Monday, after returning from West Africa and suffering from a fever, has tested negative for ebola, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Visa block

Concern has also been growing over a number of new cases in Nigeria, the region's most populous nation. On Wednesday, a nurse who treated an Ebola patient became the second person to die of the disease there.

Nigeria's Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu described the outbreak as a national emergency, adding that "everyone in the world is at risk" because of air travel.

The Saudi man who was suspected of contracting the disease died of cardiac arrest, according to the website of the country's health ministry.

The 40-year-old is said to have returned from a recent business trip to Sierra Leone.

The ministry's website said he was being tested for Ebola, but did not say if the tests had concluded that he had the disease.

The website said the man had been treated in an isolation ward and would be buried according to Islamic tradition, while following precautions set out by world health authorities.

Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia stopped issuing visas to Muslims from several West African countries, amid concerns that visiting pilgrims could spread the disease.

Meanwhile, two US aid workers who contracted Ebola in Liberia appear to be improving after receiving an unapproved medicine ahead of their evacuation back to the US.

But it is not clear if the ZMapp drug, which has only been tested on monkeys, can be credited with their improvement.

WHO response

In a surprise move, the WHO said on Wednesday it would convene a meeting of medical ethics specialists next week to decide whether to approve experimental treatment for Ebola.

"We need to ask the medical ethicists to give us guidance on what the responsible thing to do is," WHO Assistant Director General Marie-Paule Kieny said in a statement.

Some leading infectious disease experts have been calling for experimental treatments to be offered more widely to treat the disease.

The aim of the WHO's emergency committee meeting is to focus solely on how to respond to the Ebola outbreak.

If a public health emergency is declared, it could involve detailed plans to identify, isolate and treat cases, as well as impose travel restrictions on affected areas.

A WHO spokesman said: "We can't speculate in advance what the committee members are going to decide in advance."

The World Bank is allocating $200m (£120m) in emergency assistance for countries battling to contain Ebola.

The virus spreads by contact with infected blood and bodily fluids. The current outbreak is killing between 50% and 60% of people infected.

There is no cure or vaccine for Ebola - but patients have a better chance of survival if they receive early treatment.

Ebola has initial flu-like symptoms that can lead to external haemorrhaging from areas like eyes and gums, and internal bleeding which can lead to organ failure.

05 August 2014 (Primary Source) Concerned about Ebola? You’re worrying about the wrong disease

A deadly disease is set to hit the shores of the US, UK and much of the rest of the northern hemisphere in the coming months. It will swamp our hospitals, lay millions low and by this time next year between 250,000 and 500,000 worldwide will be dead, thousands of them in the US and Britain.

Despite the best efforts of the medical profession, there’s no reliable cure, and no available vaccine offers effective protection for longer than a few months at a time.

If you’ve been paying attention to recent, terrifying headlines, you may assume the illness is the Ebola virus. Instead, the above description refers to seasonal flu – not swine or bird flu, but regular garden variety influenza.

Our fears about illness often bear little relation to our chances of falling victim to it, a phenomenon not helped by media coverage, which tends towards the novel and lurid rather than the particularly dangerous.

Ebola has become the stuff of hypochondriacs’ nightmares across the world. In the UK, the Daily Mirror had “Ebola terror as passenger dies at Gatwick” (the patient didn’t have Ebola), while New York’s news outlets (and prominent tweeters) experienced their own Ebola scare.

Even intellectual powerhouses such as Donald Trump have fallen into panic, with the mogul calling for the US to shut off all travel to west Africa and revoke citizens’ right to return to the country – who cares about fundamental rights during an outbreak? Not to be outdone, the endlessly asinine “explanatory journalism” site Vox informed us that “If the supercontinent Pangaea spontaneously reunited, the US would border the Ebola epidemic”.

Ebola is a horrific disease that kills more than half of people infected by it, though with specialist western treatment that death rate would likely fall a little. It’s unsurprising that the prospect of catching it is a scary one. The relief is that it’s not all that infectious: direct contact with bodily fluids of a visibly infected person is required, meaning that, compared with many illnesses, it’s easily contained.

Even in the midst of the current outbreak – the worst ever – the spread of the disease has not been rapid in west Africa: around 400 new cases were reported in June, and a further 500 or so in July. This is a linear spread, meaning each person at present is infecting on average around (actually just over) one additional person.

Far more worrying are diseases that spread exponentially: if one infected person spreads the disease to two or more on average, the illness spreads far quicker and is a much more worrying prospect, even if mortality is considerably lower.

The 800-plus deaths from Ebola in Africa so far this year are indisputably tragic, but it is important to keep a sense of proportion – other infectious diseases are far, far deadlier.

Since the Ebola outbreak began in February, around 300,000 people have died from malaria, while tuberculosis has likely claimed over 600,000 lives. Ebola might have our attention, but it’s not even close to being the biggest problem in Africa right now. Even Lassa fever, which shares many of the terrifying symptoms of Ebola (including bleeding from the eyelids), kills many more than Ebola – and frequently finds its way to the US.

The most real effect for millions of people reading about Ebola will be fear and stigma. During the Sars outbreak of 2003, Asian-Americans became the targets of just that, with public health hotlines inundated with calls from Americans worried about “buying Asian merchandise”, “living near Asians”, “going to school with Asians”, and more.

Similarly, during the H1N1 “swine flu” outbreak, which had almost identical spread and mortality to seasonal flu, patients reported extreme fear, prompted largely by the hysterical coverage.

In the coming months, almost none of us will catch the Ebola virus. Many of us, though, will get fevers, headaches, shivers and more.

As planes get grounded, communities are stigmatised, and mildly sick people fear for their lives, it’s worth reflecting what the biggest threat to our collective wellbeing is: rare tropical diseases, or our terrible coverage of them.

06 August 2014 (Primary Source) WHO to convene emergency meeting on Ebola

UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 5 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations health agency will convene a two-day meeting of its emergency committee starting Wednesday to discuss the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, a UN spokeswoman said here on Tuesday.

"According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of 1 August, the number of Ebola cases stands at 1,603, including 887 deaths, in four countries: Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone," UN Associate Spokesperson Vannina Maestracci said at a daily briefing.

Maestracci noted that between July 31 and Aug. 1, there were a total of 163 new cases and 61 deaths in two days.

"Human and financial resource mobilization continues to be sought from WHO's partners, UN agencies, and other stakeholders," she said.

"WHO has also announced it was convening a meeting of its emergency committee over the next two days," said the spokeswoman.

The aim of the emergency meeting is to determine whether the current Ebola viral disease outbreak in West Africa constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.

If so, the committee would recommend to the WHO Director- General to declare it a public health emergency of international concern and recommend appropriate temporary measures to reduce international spread of the virus.

The UN health agency is scheduled to hold a press conference with Dr. Keiji Fukuda, WHO Assistant Director-General for Health Security, at 9 a.m. Geneva time on Friday on the outcome of the meeting of the emergency committee, which might finish its work quite late at night on Thursday.

Ebola, which spreads through mucous and other body fluid or secretions such as stool, urine, saliva and semen of infected people, is believed to be very difficult to control.

05 August 2014 (Primary Soucre) World Bank pledges $200m to contain Ebola

The World Bank has pledged $200m to help contain the deadly Ebola virus, with the growing crisis forcing healthcare system in Liberia to shut down out of fear of staff contracting the virus.

The World Bank said on Monday that it would provide up to $200m in emergency assistance to Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone to help the West African nations contain the deadly outbreak which has killed 887 since the outbreak began in March this year.

Jim Yong Kim, World Bank president, himself an expert on infectious diseases, said he has been monitoring the spread of the virus and was "deeply saddened" at how it was contributing to the breakdown of "already weak health systems in the three countries".

The funding will help provide medical supplies, pay healthcare staff, and take care of other priorities to contain the epidemic and try to prevent future outbreaks, the World Bank said.

The announcement came as health centres in Liberia's capital city of Monrovia shut down because medical personnel became too afraid to turn up to work, the Associated Press news agency reported.

Both Liberia's and Sierra Leone's top Ebola doctors lost their lives to the disease after caring for numerous people.

Healthcare personnel in Liberia say they have not received sufficient support from the government to be able to deal with possible Ebola patients walking through their doors.

"The health workers think that they are not protected, they don't have the requisite material to use as to protect themselves against the Ebola disease, so many of the health workers including physician's assistants, nurses, are staying home," said Amos Richards, a physician's assistant from Monrovia.

Crisis meeting

Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and ministers held a crisis meeting on Sunday to discuss a series of anti-Ebola measures as police contained infected communities in the northern Lofa county.

Tolbert Nyensuah, deputy health minister, said the government was doing its best to collect bodies as quickly as possible. He said that 30 bodies were buried over the weekend in a mass grave outside the city.

The government purchased land from a private citizen and that land will be used to bury the bodies, he said.

Nigeria's health ministry announced on Monday that a doctor in Lagos who treated a Liberian victim had contracted the virus - the second confirmed case in the city, and the fourth case involving a doctor.

The US doctor infected with the virus, "seems to be improving", the director of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control, where he is being treated in an isolation unit, said on Sunday.

A second American infected with the virus while working in Liberia was flying back to the US on Tuesday.

05 August 2014 (Primary Source) The Ebola Outbreak: 'A Dress Rehearsal For The Next Big One'

Until this year, the world had recorded 1,640 deaths from Ebola since the virus was discovered in 1976.

Then Ebola appeared in West Africa.

So far this year, 887 people have died of Ebola in West Africa, the World Health Organization said Monday.

To put that into perspective, more than a third of all people known to have died from the Ebola virus have died in the current outbreak.

And the outbreak is still spreading at a frightening rate. Last week, there were more than 200 new cases reported across four countries.

To find out more about the origins of Ebola — and what may lie ahead — we talked to author David Quammen. He wrote the book Spillover, which traces the evolution of Ebola, HIV and other diseases that move from animals to people.

Here's an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for clarity.


The title of your book is Spillover. What does this term mean?


Spillover is the event when a disease, or the agent that causes it, moves from one species to another.


In particular, there's a group of diseases, called zoonotic diseases, which pass from nonhuman animals into humans. And spillover is the moment when a new virus has the opportunity to leap from a bat, monkey or rodent into its first human victim.


We're pretty sure that's what happened with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.


How widespread is the Ebola virus in Africa? Are there pockets of wild animals, such as fruit bats, carrying Ebola in certain regions? Or is the virus really widespread in animals?


The Ebola virus seems to be confined to the moist forests of Central and West Africa.


We don't know where Ebola lives permanently — its so-called reservoir host. A reservoir is the animal in which a pathogen or virus lives inconspicuously, without causing symptoms. That's its refuge, its home. The virus replicates in the reservoir host at a relatively low rate and doesn't cause trouble.


For Ebola, bats are a key suspect. Three species have been found to carry antibodies to Ebola. But nobody has actually found live Ebola viruses in those bats.


Scientists don't know how the Ebola outbreak in West Africa started. But how have other Ebola outbreaks begun?


Each of these new, emerging diseases is sort of a mystery story. The first mystery to be solved is what's the reservoir host and what caused it to spill over into humans.


There was one Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it was suspected that the first case involved contact with a big fruit bat.


There were some large, migratory fruit bats roosting along the river in this area. One man in particular bought a bat at a market and carried it home. Then, I believe, the infection passed from him to his daughter. There was a strong, but not definite, implication that the killing of fruit bats, and the selling and buying of them in the market, is what triggered an outbreak.


How did we go from a virus that's found largely in animals to a virus that can be deadly for humans — and spread across four countries?


Human behavior is causing this problem. More and more, we're going into wild, diverse ecosystems around the world, especially tropical forests.


Some scientists believe that each individual species of animal, plant, bacterium and fungus in these places carries at least one unique virus, maybe even 10 of them.


We, humans, go into those wild ecosystems. We cut down trees. We build mines, roads and villages. We kill the animals and eat them. Or we capture them and transport them around the world.


In doing that, we expose ourselves to all these viruses living around the world. That gives the viruses the opportunity to spill over into humans. Then in some cases, once the virus makes that first spillover, it discovers that it might be highly transmissible in humans. Then you might have an epidemic or a pandemic.


Is the Ebola virus in West Africa changing over time and becoming more contagious in people?


Potentially. That's a real concern.


Viruses evolve by way of Darwinian natural selection. The more cases of Ebola we have, the more chances the virus gets to replicate. And the more chances there [are] for it to mutate in a particular way that it adapts well to living in humans — and perhaps transmitting more easily from human to human.


The longer this outbreak in West Africa goes on, the more chances there are for the Ebola virus to mutate and adapt. That's no small concern.


Do you think this Ebola outbreak is the next "big one"?


I would hope that this outbreak could — however bad it may become — could be controlled short of the scope of the big epidemics and pandemics. It seems more than likely that it can.


So I don't think this Ebola outbreak is the next big one. But I think it's a dress rehearsal for the next big one.


The experts I talk to say the next big one will almost certainly be caused by a zoonotic virus, coming out of animals. And it's likely to be one that is transmissible through the respiratory route — that is, through a sneeze or cough.


Ebola is not an easily transmissible virus. It requires direct contact with bodily fluids. It doesn't travel on the respiratory route.


Viruses such as the Middle East respiratory syndrome and SARS are much more of a concern to scientists that study these things than Ebola because they are already transmissible through the respiratory route. They are also highly adaptable, and they mutate quickly.


In terms of the next big one, SARS and MERS stand higher on the watch list than Ebola.

05 August 2014 (Primary Source) Nigerian Official Says 7 More Show Ebola Symptoms

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — A total of eight people in Nigeria who were in direct contact with a man who flew to Lagos and died of Ebola now have symptoms of the dreaded and deadly disease and have been placed into quarantine, a Nigerian health official said Tuesday.


Of the eight, only a doctor who treated the traveler has so far tested positive for Ebola. The others are being tested, with results pending, said Lagos state health health commissioner Jide Idris.


The official death toll for the worst-ever outbreak for the disease stood on Monday at 887, according to the World Health Organization. Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia have been affected much more severely than Nigeria, which has experienced only one death. Though as Africa's most populous nation, Nigeria poses a grave risk of the disease catching on like wildfire.


Most of the people in quarantine had made contact in a hospital in Lagos with Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, Idris told reporters. Sawyer died on July 25, five days after arriving in Nigeria.


Others may have been infected in Lagos, a city with a population of about 21 million, before doctors suspected that Sawyer had Ebola. They put him in isolation about 24 hours after he arrived at the hospital.


"At that point in time, especially the first day, the nature of the disease was not known," said Idris.


During that window of time, it's possible more people got infected, he said as he defended the actions of health authorities.


"If they knew his history they probably would have taken better precautions," he said.


The eight quarantined people, who include the doctor, are among 14 who had "serious direct contact" with Sawyer, most of them at the hospital, Idris said. Authorities are following the conditions of a total of 70 people who had primary contact with Sawyer, and now they are tracking the secondary contacts of the eight people in quarantine, Idris said.


He said volunteers are needed to track down all the people who potential carriers of the disease had been in contact with.


The West African outbreak of Ebola started in March.

01 August 2014 (Primary Source) Obama says Ebola outbreak must be taken seriously, US taking precautions for US-Africa summit

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama says he is taking the Ebola outbreak in Africa seriously. He says the United States is taking precautions for next week's U.S.-African summit in the nation's capital.

He says the federal Centers for Disease Control is working with international health organizations to provide assistance to the affected countries. He says this outbreak is more aggressive than in the past.

Administration officials said the leaders of Liberia and Sierra Leone had cancelled their trip to Washington for the gathering of African leaders.

U.S. health officials on Thursday warned Americans not to travel to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where the Ebola virus has killed more than 700 people this year. The current outbreak is the largest since the disease first emerged in Africa nearly 40 years ago.