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Conakry, Guinea: The deadliest outbreak of the Ebola virus in seven years has killed 70 people and infected as many as 111 in Guinea, causing neighbouring Senegal to close its border.
Senegal's Ministry of Interior has ordered all movements of people through the southern boundary to Guinea suspended indefinitely to prevent the spread of the disease, according to a statement published Saturday by the state-run press agency, APS.
Most of the cases detected in Guinea since January have been in the towns of Guekedou, Macenta, Kissidougou and Dabola, the country's Health Ministry said in an emailed statement on Friday. There has been one death among eight cases of the infectious disease in the capital, Conakry, it said.
It marks the deadliest outbreak since 2007, when 187 people died of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the World Health Organisation's website.
The Economic Community of West African States, a regional body known as ECOWAS, expressed "deep concern" over the outbreak on Friday and called for international help to thwart the "serious threat" it poses to regional security.
Twenty laboratories and research sites around the world, including in Canada, Japan, Israel, Uganda, and the United States are working simultaneously to develop manmade antibodies against Ebola virus. Antibodies are frontline immune system proteins the body makes naturally to fight illness when first exposed to an infection. Immune system proteins targeting Ebola, when administered by injection, have a high cure rate in animal experiments, says Erica Ollmann Saphire, an immunologist with Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. We have done a lot of experiments in non-human primates and if you can get the antibody into them within 48 hours after exposure, you can save nearly all of the animals. And even if you wait four or five days - say, someone that did not know they had been exposed - you wait four or five days for that animal to develop complete hemorrhagic fever, you can save more than half, said Saphire.
Ingesting the disease
The disease, contracted through consumption of infected bats and tainted bush meat, quickly causes severe headache, fever and muscle aches before patients develop full-blown symptoms of vomiting, diarrhea and hemorrhaging. The United States has contributed $28 million to an effort aimed at determining which of the half dozen or so antibodies being developed around the world are the most effective in fighting the deadly virus. A successful treatment for Ebola may ultimately contain a mix of several antibodies.
Saphire is leading the research effort, which is being coordinated by the Scripps Institute. She says normally, it takes several days for the body to make antibodies against an infection, time which most Ebola patients do not have. It is a way to make somebody immediately immune ... And so the idea is that we have gotten these antibodies either from cells donated by survivors or by immunizing mice, and we humanize the antibodies; we can just take these things that we have grown in cell culture and give them to you right now to protect you from your infection that you have immediately without, you know, having to wait four days, she said.
Antibodies and virology
Saphire said limited supplies of the antibodies, so far untested in humans, have been sent to Guinea to help Ebola victims. The global effort to develop an antibody drug against Ebola, Saphire said, is unique in the world of virology. And so that kind of the magnificent thing about this is that the whole field is contributing to the study to come up with the single best treatment available in the world. So, it is not going to be the Canadian treatment versus the American treatment versus competing labs. Everyone is on the same page in one set of ... experiments, she said. In the early stages, Ebola can be difficult to distinguish from other diseases that are endemic to Africa, including malaria and cholera. So, diagnostic tests also have been sent to Guinea and neighboring countries to aid in detection and efforts to treat those infected with the virus.
Development of Antibodies Rushed to Treat Ebola Outbreak in Guinea
The outbreak that began in Guinea’s southeastern forest region last month is causing widespread fear as the death toll rises and the outbreak spreads. Leaders throughout the region have said that there is no reason to panic, but people say they are becoming increasingly worried. "I’m afraid," admitted Steve Doe, a resident of Liberia's capital, Monrovia. "I mean the way it attacks one, you know, and the way it kills. I’m afraid that the outbreak will be known in Liberia - or anywhere for that matter. We are all human beings, so yes, I’m afraid." Guinea's Ministry of Health says more than 70 people have died since the first suspected case was treated on February 9.
More than 125 people across three countries are now believed to have been affected by the highly contagious virus. The health ministry confirmed last week that the virus had made its way to the capital, Conakry. Aid organizations say this is a worrying development, as the city is densely populated and many people lack access to water and good sanitation. In Liberia, at least two people have tested positive for Ebola. Sierra Leone has also reported suspected cases of the virus. On Saturday, Senegal closed the land border it shares with Guinea in the southeast of the country as a preventative measure.
Medical personnel at the emergency entrance of a hospital receive suspected Ebola virus patients in Conakry, Guinea.
Papa Konaté, who lives in Dakar, said he is scared that this may not be enough, adding that Ebola is a disease that can affect anyone. "So of course we are afraid," he said. "We pass people on the streets and then we enter into our homes -- and you see, here in Dakar, there are many Guineans everywhere." Konaté says there are many Guineans who come and go, who leave and come back without a problem. "It’s risky," he added. According to health officials, the Ebola cases that were found in Liberia can be traced back to individuals who recently traveled to Guinea. There is no vaccine against Ebola and no medication to cure the virus, which is spread through close contact with bodily fluids, such as sweat, blood or saliva, of an infected person or animal. Doctors say the only way to contain the outbreak is to stop further infections.
Monrovian resident Ameago Sekou Kamara said he and his family have begun taking precautions to avoid contracting the Ebola virus. "Ebola is a deadly disease...so we are following all the measures we have been given by the Ministry of Health and Social welfare," Kamara explained, "like preventing handshakes, stop eating bush meat and avoid coming to where there is information that there is an outbreak. Even if a family member that is very close to you has it, you should not get associated with the person until you have medical advice." West African authorities and aid organizations say they are taking all possible measures to contain the outbreak. They urge people to act wisely and follow preventative measures.
Deadly Ebola Virus Sparks Fears in West Africa
Part of the problem is that the deadly virus is rare and its victims are often poor people living in rural areas of Africa without well-functioning health systems. But there is also little incentive for major pharmaceutical companies to invest in medical solutions when there is little chance of a return.
The number of doses sold is likely to be small and many health officials believe the virus and its death toll could be better controlled with good basic hygiene and the eradication of dangerous bushmeat consumption. Yet there is a drug development pipeline, of sorts, out there - mainly funded by the U.S. government which fears such deadly viruses might one day be developed into bioweapons. "We can do basic research quite cheaply, but when you move from that to trying to develop drugs and vaccines, you get into the need for clinical trials and they are very costly - which is where you would normally start to engage with Big Pharma," said Jonathan Ball, a professor of molecular virology at Britain's University of Nottingham. "And clearly they are not going to invest unless there is likely to be some sort of decent return."
Discovered in 1976 after an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire, Ebola causes a severe hemorrhagic fever where victims suffer vomiting, diarrhea and both internal and external bleeding. In an outbreak in Guinea in West Africa, about 86 suspected cases have been reported, with 62 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Investigations are going on into reported cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone along the border with Guinea.
Bioweapon Fears
"Ebola virus is one of the deadliest killers known," said Ben Neuman, a virologist at Britain's University of Reading. "[It] is one of the things that keeps public health officials up at night. If this virus spread between people more easily, it would probably be more deadly than the black plague. Fortunately, up to this point, it has not." So while for drugmakers there is little commercial future in Ebola, some research groups in the United States are working in conjunction with the U.S. government to find treatments. In March, the University of Texas and three other organizations got $26 million in funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to find a cure for Ebola and another deadly virus Marburg in case they are ever used for bioterrorism in the United States. Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, which teamed up with the U.S. Department of Defense on an injectable drug treatment for Ebola, started an initial Phase I trial in healthy volunteers in January.
Several small biotech companies and U.S. university departments are also developing potential vaccines, but this work has yet to advance from animal studies into clinical trials in humans - so any use in people now would be very risky. U.S.-based Inovio and privately held Vaxart are among those with experimental vaccines in animal testing, while GlaxoSmithKline last year acquired Swiss vaccine firm Okairos with an early-stage Ebola product. "There are a few experimental vaccines, but the question is whether anybody would take on the costs of manufacture based on the likely number of doses they would eventually sell," said Ian Jones, a professor of virology at Reading University. "The numbers of people infected are low, and at the end of the day somebody has to fund the production of a drug or vaccine. As things stand that is unlikely."
Drug Trials
Do we knoe which Ebola it is? I understand that Marburg has a 25% kill rate and there are two Ebola variants. Zaire that kills 90% and another which kills about 60% but I forget it's name.
Dr. Sakoba Keita, director of prevention at the health ministry, said anyone with a temperature higher than 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit) would be tested for the disease, which has killed 86 people in the West African nation since an outbreak began in February.
French Health Minister Marisol Touraine said Saturday that French doctors from the Pasteur Institute would be on hand to watch boarding procedures at the airport in Conakry.
Two Ebola deaths have been confirmed in neighboring Liberia, and suspected cases have also been reported in Mali.
Guinea: Airport passengers screened for Ebola
West Africa is seeing its worst Ebola outbreak since 2005, and it is every bit as terrifying as you can imagine. The incurable deadly virus has already claimed at least 83 lives in Guinea and Liberia , reports the World Health Organization (WHO). The Washington Post noted that as of today, the death toll has climbed to 86. And those who have been diagnosed with the virus — which causes severe internal bleeding and is transferable via bodily fluids — have virtually zero chance of survival, especially in Guinea, where health care facilities are scarce. According to the Post, people have stopped shaking hands or going to church for fear of getting the virus. And those who do contract the disease are sent into isolation, where they wait to die:
Ebola is so virulent that those who do test positive can only wait to die in a special ward where they are treated by medical personnel wearing protective suits and gear. The Zaire strain detected in Guinea kills up to 90 percent of its victims, and with no cure all that can be done is to make patients comfortable as their organs begin failing... Those who have been exposed to Ebola in southern Guinea are kept in one ward. If it’s confirmed they do have Ebola, they then are moved to the second pavilion to await death. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the symptoms for Ebola are, disturbingly, rather generic. They include fever, headache, joint and muscle aches, weakness, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain and lack of appetite — a lot of what you might feel if you had the flu. The CDC adds that some patients experience a rash, red eyes, hiccups, cough, sore throat, chest pain, difficulty breathing, difficulty swallowing and (at least this one is specific) bleeding inside and outside of the body. And the extremely basic preventative advice doled out by WHO does not inspire confidence:
In order to travel to and from Africa from Saskatoon, the man had to pass through two U.S. International Airports: Minneapolis and New York City and did so within the twenty-one day incubation period where he was capable of infecting others. From Wired.com . . . News from the Minnesota Department of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: A Minnesota traveler returning from Africa has been hospitalized with what the CDC confirms to be Lassa fever, a viral hemorrhagic fever that is often lumped together with Ebola hemorrhagic fever, though they are caused by different organisms.
From Canada's Global Post . . . “We are facing an epidemic of a magnitude never before seen in terms of the distribution of cases,” Mariano Lugli, coordinator of Doctors Without Borders in Conakry, Guinea's capital, said in a statement. The man in Canada who was alleged to have been infected would have passed through two US International Airports on his way to Saskatoon: Minneapolis and New York. U.S. authorities are not revealing whether the New York City airport was Kennedy Airport in Jamaica, Queens, NY (JFK) or Newark, NJ (EWR) both of which provide service to and from Africa. Suddenly, on March 31 some other fellow shows up in Minneapolis with Lassa virus, an Ebola-type hemorrhagic virus. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta did not immediately return calls for further information.
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The number of new cases have fallen rapidly, Rafi Diallo, a spokesman for Guineas health ministry, told Reuters. On the day of the interview, April 15, there were 159 confirmed or suspected cases of the disease. Once we no longer have any new cases we can say that this is totally under control. Its eight days later. And the number of those killed by the Ebola killed in Guinea is now 136. Nearly 210 cases have been confirmed. In all, across Liberia and Guinea, 142 people have been killed and 242 infected in an outbreak that began months ago in the forested villages of southeast Guinea and shot to the capital city.
It has dominated headlines in Africa since. The World Health Organization, which says it may spread for months, cautions that more deaths could be on the way. As the incubation period for [Ebola] can be up to three weeks, it is likely that the Guinean health authorities will report new cases in the coming weeks and additional suspected cases may also be identified in neighboring countries, the WHO reported on Tuesday. The disease, for which there is no cure, is terrifying in part because of the gruesome way it kills. It predominantly spreads through blood, secretions and other bodily fluids. At first, the WHO says, symptoms include intense weakness and fever, but then the sickness deepens with bouts of diarrhea, vomiting, and internal and external bleeding.
There are several theories explaining the outbreak, Africas worst in seven years and the first to kill in the continents west. One was published last week in the New England Journal that established the emergence of a new EBOV strain in Guinea, which had evolved in parallel to other disease veins. It said the sickness first appeared in December substantially earlier than other estimates. The [virus] introduction seems to have happened in early December 2013 or even before, the researchers said. It is suspected that the virus was transmitted for months before the outbreak became apparent because of clusters of cases in the [Guinea] hospitals of Guéckédou and Macenta. This length of exposure appears to have allowed many transmission chains and thus increased the number of cases of Ebola virus disease.
The scientists said data suggests a single introduction of the virus into the human population. Further investigation is ongoing to identify the presumed animal source of the outbreak. The animal thats most likely behind the outbreak is the fruit bat, which pervades large swaths of west Africa. Officials suspect someone ate the meat of a contaminated bat, fell ill, and then spread the infection. The fatality rate, the study concluded, was 86 percent among the early confirmed and 71 percent among the clinically suspected cases, a rate consistent with previous Ebola outbreaks. The emergence of the virus in Guinea highlights the risk of [Ebola] outbreaks in the whole West African sub-region.
The African Ebola outbreak that shows no sign of slowing
Jonas Hagensen, of Doctors Without Borders, says many of the people receiving treatment at the center in Conakry know how they were exposed. "A lot of the people who come into our centers, they actually know how they had been infected because they had been in close contact with a person that they know had had Ebola."
Medical personnel at the emergency entrance of a hospital receive suspected Ebola virus patients in Conakry, Guinea.
In a VOA interview, Hagensen said medical relief workers are concerned about people who may be showing symptoms of the deadly virus but are not receiving treatment. "The concern is that the people who are sick, they actually get into the treatment center and that we make sure that we have all of their contacts. That is the difficult part, to get people who believe that they are sick and they know that they had contact with someone who had Ebola, that we can get the whole picture of all those people who had been in contact with that person. It is a huge, huge work and it is very, very demanding."
At least 142 deaths from Ebola have been reported in Guinea and Liberia since the outbreak erupted in the region in February. Health officials are also investigating confirmed or suspected cases in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Ebola virus is spread by contact with bodily fluids. It causes symptoms that include vomiting, unstoppable bleeding and organ failure.
Ebola Death Toll Rises in West Africa
