Safety tip: Don't have unprotected sex with ebola patients (eyeroll)

[Delta4Embassy]

Was just gonna laugh and move on, but nothing like sharing a laugh.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-10-ebola-persist-semen-months.html

" The Ebola virus may persist in some men's semen for nine months after they were initially infected, far longer than previously thought, according to preliminary research out Wednesday.

The first long-term study of its kind, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, adds to growing evidence that Ebola can linger in the body, causing health problems for months or even years."

...Important safety tip, thanks Egon.

 

[strollingbones]

damn and that was next on my bucket list

 

[waltky]

Ebola is spreading again ...

UN: Two New Cases Of Ebola In Guinea Show Disease Is Spreading
October 16, 2015 — The World Health Organization says there were two new cases of Ebola in Guinea this week, ending two consecutive weeks in West Africa when no cases of the devastating disease were reported.

The two new patients were not previously identified contacts being tracked by health authorities, suggesting that officials are still unable to monitor everyone exposed to Ebola. WHO spokeswoman Dr. Margaret Harris said Friday the U.N. health agency had expected to see more cases despite the recent lull in the epidemic. She added the cases were in areas where scientists knew Ebola was spreading.

In an update this week, WHO said there was a “near-term risk of further cases among both registered and untraced contacts.”

To date, Ebola has killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa.

UN: 2 new Ebola cases in Guinea show virus still spreading

 

[waltky]

Open-source software developers helped end Ebola epidemic...

Software developers helped end Ebola epidemic
Sat, Jan 02, 2016 - Little known to the rest of the world, a team of open-source software developers played a small, but integral part in helping to stop the spread of Ebola in Sierra Leone, solving a payroll crisis that was hindering the fight against the disease.

Emerson Tan from NetHope, a consortium of non-governmental organizations working in information techonology and development, told the tale at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. “These guys basically saved their country from complete collapse. I can’t overestimate how many lives they saved,” Tan said about his copresenters, Salton Arthur Massally, Harold Valentine Mac-Saidu and Francis Banguara, who appeared on a video link. Tan was dispatched to Sierra Leone in October 2014 with a vague mandate: “Go there and improve things.”

The problem that most urgently needed solving was distributing wages to healthcare workers on the front line fighting the epidemic. “In the old system, nobody gets paid, for months,” Tan said. Doctors and nurses were forced to take money from patients, he said, undermining people’s confidence in the health system at a vital time, and when healthcare workers went on strike, Ebola patients in hospital quarantines broke out in search of food, exacerbating the spread of the disease.

When millions of US dollars began pouring in from international sources, it was not clear how to distribute it to the 30,000 healthcare workers needed to tackle the epidemic, because until that point payroll had been handled in cash. Tan said he was sometimes handling “kilograms of money.” “Sometimes I would just weigh it, because it’s easier to weigh a stack of money than to count it,” he said.

The nation’s central bank at one point informed him it was going to run out of bank notes. On top of those problems, there were only eight ATMs in the entire nation. Time was a pressing concern. A UN official told Tan: “We have a couple of months, or we’re going to lose the region.” To solve the problem, Massally and his team drew on existing open-source software for payroll management, biometrics, logistics and accounting. “None of this would be possible without open-source software and frameworks,” Tan told the audience at the technology conference. “You could not possibly develop systems this quickly for such low amounts of money without the existence of this huge open-source ecosystem.”

MORE

 

[waltky]

End to ebola outbreak in Africa...

Deadliest Ebola Outbreak on Record Is Over, W.H.O. Says
JAN. 14, 2016 — The World Health Organization declared on Thursday the end to the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record, which killed and sickened tens of thousands of people in West Africa, even as it cautioned that more flare-ups of the disease were likely.

The announcement in Geneva came after a recent chain of cases in Liberia was snuffed out, marking the first time since the start of the epidemic two years ago that Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — the three countries that were hardest hit by the virus — had reported zero cases for at least 42 days, or two incubation periods of the virus. Margaret Chan, the director general of the W.H.O., hailed the “monumental achievement” in curbing the outbreak, which, the United Nations said, killed more than 11,300 people and infected more than 28,500. At the height of the outbreak, the bodies of victims piled up in the streets of towns and cities that were overwhelmed and ill equipped to cope with the scale and speed of transmission.

But in a statement released in Geneva, Ms. Chan added that “our work is not done and vigilance is needed to prevent new outbreaks.” The immediate threat stems from persistence of the virus in body fluids, notably in the semen of male survivors, up to a year after they are cured of the disease and show no symptoms, said Rick Brennan, the W.H.O.’s director of emergency risk management, in Geneva. Ten flare-ups had been reported across the three countries in the last nine months, four of them in Liberia and three each in Guinea and Sierra Leone, “and we are anticipating more,” Mr. Brennan said.

The risk, although significant, was low, he said. The new cases had occurred on average 27 days apart, but there have been none since mid-November. Any risk diminishes over time, as survivors’ immune systems clear out the virus. W.H.O. officials said health authorities in the affected countries had put in surveillance and rapid response mechanisms for managing the risk and that those measures had proved effective in containing the flare-ups. “People of course want to return to a normal, but it’s a new normal,” said Peter Graaff, a W.H.O. director who is in charge of Ebola response. “Ebola has been added to a number of their diseases that affect the population.” The three West African countries now have the world’s biggest pool of expertise in handling the Ebola virus and greater professionalism, confidence and resources for dealing with it, he said.

MORE

 

[waltky]

Uganda Develops New Test to Detect Ebola...

Researchers in Uganda Develop New Test to Detect Ebola
January 29, 2016 — Researchers in Uganda say they have developed a new Ebola test kit that detects the virus in minutes. Current tests for Ebola take anywhere from several hours to several days. The development is a potential milestone in the fight against the deadly virus.

According to researchers at Makarere University in Kampala, the new test can detect the virus already in the early stages of exposure. Misaki Wanyengera, leader of the research group, says the test may be able to prevent future outbreaks like the one in West Africa that killed more than 11,000 people. “We want a test that can run through the whole spectrum of infection. We don’t want a scenario where this gentleman, I forgot his name, from Liberia, gets on a plane and finally ends up in Texas," he said. "By the time someone develops temperature problems they’re already past 21 days of infection. So the test we’re developing should be able to capture people even before they develop their symptoms - you know the fever, the bleeding.”

A health worker stands at Elwa hospital in Monrovia, Sept. 7, 2014, The facility is run by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors without Borders).​

The accuracy of the test has been verified by Grant Challenges Canada, a Canadian government-funded program that promotes health projects in low-income countries. The organization partially funded the research that developed the new test.

Easy to Use

Babirye Janet Peace, a lab technologist who was part of the rapid test kit's development, says it is very easy to use. “It has a capturing antibody and then you bring in your sample and then you bring in your detecting antibody and the substrate to be able to visualize the reaction in the case there’s one," she said. So with one drop of blood on a small piece of paper, medical workers will be able to detect if someone has Ebola within hours of initial exposure. One of the biggest challenges with Ebola is that the virus is highly infectious. And with current methods, medical staff often need a laboratory and must carry out elaborate tests. This often proved quite challenging with the virus surfacing in remote forest villages.

Wanyengera says this new test breaks down these barriers. “The first index cases that happen for Ebola outbreaks in Equatorial Africa, they happen in remote settings, village settings where there are no laboratories," he said. "So in the remote setting you need what we call a point of care test. A point of care test is something which can be done at the point of care outside the laboratory setting. It’s easy to use. You don’t need a lot of technical training.” It has taken years to develop the new test kit. Initial steps were taken in 2007, after previous, smaller outbreaks in Uganda.

Funding research

 

[waltky]

American company bungled Ebola response...

AP Investigation: American company bungled Ebola response
Mar 7,`16 | WASHINGTON (AP) -- An American company that bills itself as a pioneer in tracking emerging epidemics made a series of costly mistakes during the 2014 Ebola outbreak that swept across West Africa - with employees feuding with fellow responders, contributing to misdiagnosed Ebola cases and repeatedly misreading the trajectory of the virus, an Associated Press investigation has found.

San Francisco-based Metabiota Inc. was tapped by the Sierra Leonean government and the World Health Organization to help monitor the spread of the virus and support the response after Ebola was discovered circulating in neighboring Guinea in March 2014. But emails obtained by AP and interviews with aid workers on the ground show that some of the company's actions made an already chaotic situation worse. WHO outbreak expert Dr. Eric Bertherat wrote to colleagues in a July 17, 2014, email about misdiagnoses and "total confusion" at the Sierra Leone government lab Metabiota shared with Tulane University in the city of Kenema. He said there was "no tracking of the samples" and "absolutely no control on what is being done." "This is a situation that WHO can no longer endorse," he wrote.

Metabiota chief executive officer and founder Nathan Wolfe said there was no evidence his company was responsible for the lab blunders, that the reported squabbles were overblown and that any predictions made by his employees didn't reflect the company's position. He said Metabiota doesn't specialize in outbreak response and that his employees stepped in to help and performed admirably amid the carnage of the world's biggest-ever Ebola outbreak. "Metabiota's team worked tirelessly, skillfully and at substantial potential danger to themselves to assist when most of the world was still ignoring the problem," he said in an email. "We are proud of our team efforts which went above and beyond the call of duty." Wolfe said some of the problems flagged were misunderstandings - and that others were planted by commercial rivals.

Healthcare workers load a man suspected of suffering from the Ebola virus onto an ambulance in Kenema, Sierra Leone. An Associated Press investigation found that Metabiota Inc., an American company given crucial disease-fighting responsibilities in the Ebola outbreak, was criticized for committing one blunder after another - misdiagnosing patients with the virus, feuding with other responders and offering rosy predictions about the course of the epidemic that proved wrong.​

The complaints about Metabiota mirror the wider mismanagement that hamstrung the world's response to Ebola, a disease that has killed upward of 11,000 people. Previous AP reporting has shown that WHO resisted sounding the alarm over Ebola for two months on political, religious and economic grounds and failed to put together a decisive response even after the alert was issued. The turmoil that followed left health workers in Kenema bereft of protective equipment or even body bags and using expired chlorine, a crucial disinfectant. WHO said Metabiota was well-placed to help when Ebola broke out in West Africa because of its expertise with Lassa, a related disease. The agency declined to give any detail about how it dealt with the complaints from senior staff about the firm or the status of their current relationship.

In Sierra Leone, Sylvia Blyden, who served as special executive assistant to the country's president in the early days of the outbreak, said Metabiota's response was a disaster. "They messed up the entire region," she said. She called Metabiota's attempt to claim credit for its Ebola work "an insult for the memories of thousands of Africans who have died."

"THE VIRAL STORM"