# Ebola cases surge



## Manonthestreet (Jun 23, 2014)

The Ebola virus outbreak that began this spring in Guinea, West Africa, is refusing to fade out. Cases have spread into other countries in West Africa, including Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the current case count is staggering. With about 560 suspected cases (70 percent confirmed) and a death rate of more than 65 percent, its the largest and most lethal Ebola virus outbreak on record. The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa Is Just Getting Worse - The Daily Beast


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## waltky (Jul 8, 2014)

Can ebola be prevented?...

*Ebola cannot be cured but west Africa's epidemic may have been preventable*
_8 Jul 2014:  The gaps in Sierra Leone's health system reflect need for support so that such diseases do not wreak havoc in future_


> The role of the international community in current crises in the Central African Republic and northern Nigeria may be mired in confusion, but it can do something about the Ebola epidemic in west Africa.  The outbreak of the virus, which started in Guinea and has spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone, is the deadliest in recorded history, with Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) declaring the situation out of control.  There are more than 759 cases across 60 sites since the first ones were confirmed in March  that's almost 50 known cases per week and a 20% increase in cases since 23 June. Almost 500 people have died from the disease, which has spread across international borders.
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> Ebola has a fatality rate of up to 90%  once you have it, your chances of survival may be just one in 10. There is no vaccine and no cure; the only way to stop the virus is to prevent it or treat the symptoms if diagnosed early enough. It is spread by contact with the fluids of infected people or animals, such as urine, sweat and blood. During the rainy season, from June to September in west Africa, the spread of bodily fluids is a high risk.  But here is where the international community can help. The health systems in west African countries are weak: three countries ranked 174 (Liberia), 177 (Sierra Leone) and 178 (Guinea) out of 186 countries for human development, according to the UN development programme. So, one of the world's most deadly viruses is plaguing three of the countries least equipped to cope with it.
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## waltky (Aug 19, 2014)

ZMAPP given to Liberian ebola patients...

*Liberia: 3 receiving untested Ebola drug improving*
_Aug 19,`14 -- Three Liberian health workers receiving an experimental drug for Ebola are showing signs of recovery, officials said Tuesday, though medical experts caution it is not certain if the drug is effective._


> The World Health Organization said that the death toll for West Africa's Ebola outbreak has climbed past 1,200 but that there are tentative signs that progress is being made in containing the disease.  The three Liberians are being treated with the last known doses of ZMapp, a drug that had earlier been given to two infected Americans and a Spaniard. The Americans are also improving, but the Spaniard died.  "The medical professionals have informed the Liberian information ministry their progress is `remarkable,'" the ministry said in a statement, adding that the patients are showing "very positive signs of recovery."  Experts have said it is unclear if ZMapp, which had never before been tested in humans, is effective. Even if it is, the California-based maker has said more supplies won't be available for months.
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> In the meantime, experts say the best way to stop the spread of Ebola in West Africa is to identify the sick, isolate them from the healthy and monitor everyone with whom they have been in contact.  More than 1,200 people have died of Ebola in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria in the current outbreak, and more than 2,200 have been sickened, the WHO said.  Authorities have struggled to treat and isolate the sick, in part because of widespread fear that treatment centers are places where people go to die. Many sick people have hidden in their homes, relatives have sometimes taken their loved ones away from health centers, and mobs have occasionally attacked health workers.  On Saturday, residents of the West Point slum in Liberia's capital of Monrovia attacked a center where people were being monitored for Ebola. The raid was triggered by fears that people with the disease were being brought there from all over the country, the Information Ministry said Tuesday.
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## billdad19912114 (Aug 20, 2014)

To tell you the truth, they don't need to get grimey over that situation they need to keep every head at one whole estate and in case system of things find a better sponsor or reason to live.


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## waltky (Aug 29, 2014)

Ebola virus rapidly mutating...

*Gene Studies of Ebola in Sierra Leone Show Virus Mutating Fast*
_ August 28, 2014 —Genetic studies of some of the earliest Ebola cases in Sierra Leone reveal more than 300 genetic changes in the virus as it leapt from person to person, changes that could blunt the effectiveness of diagnostic tests and experimental treatments now in development, researchers said on Thursday._


> “We found the virus is doing what viruses do. It's mutating,” said Pardis Sabeti of Harvard University and the Broad Institute, who led the massive study of samples from 78 people in Sierra Leone, all of whose infections could be traced to a faith healer whose claims of a cure attracted Ebola patients from Guinea, where the virus first took hold.  The findings, published in Science, suggest the virus is mutating quickly and in ways that could affect current diagnostics and future vaccines and treatments, such as GlaxoSmithKline's Ebola vaccine, which was just fast-tracked to begin clinical trials, or the antibody drug ZMapp, being developed by California biotech Mapp Biopharmaceutical.  The findings come as the World Health Organization said that the epidemic could infect more than 20,000 people and spread to more countries. A WHO representative could not immediately be reached for comment on the latest genetic study.
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> Study coauthor Robert Garry of Tulane University said the virus is mutating at twice the rate in people as it was in animal hosts, such as fruit bats.  Garry said the study has shown changes in the glycoprotein, the surface protein that binds the virus to human cells, allowing it to start replicating in its human host. “It's also what your immune system will recognize,” he said.  In an unusual step, the researchers posted the sequences online as soon as they became available, giving other researchers early access to the data.
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See also:

*Ebola Vaccine from GSK Fast-tracked into Clinical Trials*
_ August 28, 2014 — An experimental Ebola vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline is being fast-tracked into human studies and the company plans to build a stockpile of up to 10,000 doses for emergency deployment, if results are good._


> The research work is being accelerated with funding from an international consortium, reflecting mounting concern over the worst outbreak of the disease that has killed more than 1,500 people in West Africa.  GSK's candidate vaccine, being co-developed with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), is expected to be given to healthy volunteers in Britain and the United States from about mid-September, with the program then being extended to Gambia and Mali.  Britain's biggest drugmaker said on Thursday the Phase I trials would start as soon as they received ethical and regulatory approvals.
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> The NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is also working on a wider program of clinical trials, including tests of a version of the GSK vaccine that may fight a second strain of Ebola, as well as the West African one.  In addition, U.S. researchers plan human tests of a vaccine developed by Canadian government scientists, which has been licensed to NewLink Genetics.  The trials being announced will enroll healthy volunteers with the goal of determining whether the vaccine is safe and whether it provokes a protective immune response.  The aim is to complete these tests by the end of 2014, after which vaccines could be deployed on an emergency basis.
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## waltky (Sep 1, 2014)

Ebola now in Senegal...

*WHO: Senegal Ebola case 'a top priority emergency'*
_31 Aug.`14 — The effort to contain Ebola in Senegal is "a top priority emergency," the World Health Organization said Sunday, as the government continued tracing everyone who came in contact with a Guinean student who has tested positive for the deadly disease in the capital, Dakar._


> Senegal faces an "urgent need" for support and supplies including hygiene kits and personal protective equipment for health workers, the WHO said in a statement Sunday.  "These needs will be met with the fastest possible speed," the WHO said.  The U.N. health agency provided new information on the movements of the 21-year-old student in the city before he was diagnosed with Ebola.  Senegal confirmed that the student had tested positive for Ebola on Friday, making the country the fifth in West Africa to be affected by an outbreak that has killed more than 1,500 people.  The student showed up at a hospital in Dakar on Aug. 26 but did not reveal that he had been in contact with other Ebola victims, said Health Minister Awa Marie Coll Seck.  The next day, an epidemiological surveillance team in neighboring Guinea alerted Senegalese authorities that it had lost track of a person it was monitoring three weeks earlier, and that the person may have crossed into Senegal.
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> The student was tracked to the hospital in Dakar that same day and was immediately quarantined, and a test confirmed he had Ebola, Seck said.  In Sunday's statement, the WHO said the student arrived in Dakar by road on Aug. 20 and was staying with relatives "in the outskirts of the city."  It said that on Aug. 23, he went to a medical facility seeking treatment for fever, diarrhea and vomiting, all symptoms of Ebola.  He was treated for malaria, however, and continued to stay with his relatives before turning up at the Dakar hospital on Aug. 26.  "Though the investigation is in its early stages, he is not presently known to have traveled elsewhere," said the WHO, which received its information from Senegal's health ministry.  The presence of Ebola in Senegal, a tourist and transport hub, could complicate efforts to bring the outbreak under control. The country has already closed its land border with Guinea, where the outbreak originated, and barred air and sea travel from Sierra Leone and Liberia in an attempt to keep the disease out.
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## pismoe (Sep 4, 2014)

interesting , wonder how big it will get .


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## LAfrique (Oct 16, 2014)

I think the ebola virus is getting worse because it was meant to be. Center for Disease Control *(CDC) is now reporting about 4,494 deaths from ebola in West Africa, but  Liberia is demanding 80,000 body bags* to bury its ebola dead - Liberia needs nearly 80 000 more body bags Ebola advances Breaking News Today s top news stories 

Ebola is not a new virus and is also known by various names; the virus just got re-introduced in Africa.  - Viral hemorrhagic fever - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia and DoveMed 


I believe ebola, like AIDS and Swineflu, is the result of scientific experiment. However, one very effective way of fighting diseases and infections is hand-wash frequently. Also boosting your immune system with proper diet - such as eating foods high in Vitamin C, and eating your fruits and vegetables are very helpful.


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## waltky (Jul 30, 2018)

*Bats now carry ebola...*




*New Ebola species is reported for first time in a decade*
Jul 28, 2018 - The family of Ebola viruses has just gotten a bit bigger.[/i]


> The government of Sierra Leone has announced that a new species of Ebola, the sixth, has been discovered there in bats. It has been called, provisionally, the Bombali virus, after a district in the north of the country where it was found.  There’s no evidence the new virus has infected people, although EcoHealth Alliance, an environmental nonprofit group involved in the discovery, said on Twitter that it has the potential to infect human cells.  The discovery was made by scientists from the University of California at Davis and Columbia University as part of a U.S.-funded effort to find unknown viruses that have the potential to cause outbreaks in people.  “It is really interesting. I think it’s exciting. But I think we have a lot of work to do to really understand if it is a pathogen and whether it does or doesn’t pose a threat,” Tracey Goldstein, of the One Health Institute at UC Davis, told STAT on Friday.
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> Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, said a scientific paper detailing the discovery is in the publication pipeline. Some journal forbid public discussion of work they are considering publishing and Goldstein would not say anything about where and when the work would be published.  The normal process for announcing the discovery of a new virus is through a peer-reviewed journal, where the scientists making the claim lay out details of how they found the virus — or in this case, genetic evidence of a virus — and the work they did to prove that it was new, and not simply a new strain of an already known pathogen.  However, Sierra Leone, which had been notified of the discovery, wanted to first make the announcement to local press on Thursday.  “They want to preempt negative rumors, and are rolling out education programs to reduce potential for spillover,” Daszak said.





> Doctors help each other with their protective suits during an Ebola virus drill at the Doctor Ramon de Lara hospital in the Dominican Air Force base at Santo Domingo​
> Goldstein said the virus was discovered in two types of bats of the Molossid family, Angolan free-tailed bats and Little free-tailed bats. These two species of bats roost together, Goldstein said. They are found widely across sub-Saharan Africa.  The infected bats were found roosting in people’s homes, she reported in ProMED, an online infectious disease reporting system.  The scientists did not try to extract live viruses from samples taken from the bats, Goldstein said. Viral fragments – RNA – were detected; there was enough material to sequence “an almost complete genome,” Daszak said.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have received samples from bats that tested positive for the Bombali virus.
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> Stuart Nichol, chief of the viral special pathogens branch, said the CDC scientists will try to see if they can extract a whole infectious virus from oral and rectal swabs taken from the bats.  Nichol said it’s clear from the genetic sequence of the Bombali virus that it is sufficiently different from other types of ebolaviruses to qualify as a separate species.  Whether the virus is dangerous to humans isn’t currently known. The scientists who discovered it made a copy of the main protein on the exterior of the virus — using the genetic code as the recipe, Nichol said. They put that protein on what’s called a pseudovirus, a benign synthetic virus-like entity that is used in research.  The pseudovirus bearing the Bombali virus protein was able to infect human cells, he said. But you cannot conclude from that that the Bombali virus would sicken people. “Just because it enters human cells doesn’t mean it will cause human disease,” Nichol said.
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## waltky (Aug 2, 2018)

*Deadly Ebola Outbreak Confirmed in Eastern DRC...*
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*Deadly Ebola Outbreak Confirmed in Eastern DRC*
*August 01, 2018 - Four cases of the Ebola virus have been confirmed in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, officials confirmed Wednesday.*




> *Julien Paluku, governor of North Kivu province, announced the outbreak on Twitter, just a week after Congolese and U.N. health officials announced the end of a separate outbreak that killed 33 people in the country’s northwest. There is no evidence yet suggesting the two outbreaks in the Congo are linked.  “Although we did not expect to face a tenth epidemic so early, the detection of the virus is an indicator of the proper functioning of the surveillance system,” said the country’s health minister, Oly Ilunga Kalenga, in a statement.*
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> *Ebola was first identified in the Congo in 1976. A highly infective virus, it can be spread via contact with animals or the bodily fluids of the infected — including the dead.  The health ministry said there were 26 cases of hemorrhagic fever in the North Kivu province, including 20 deaths. Six samples from these patients were tested, and four tested positive for Ebola, the ministry said.*
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## waltky (Aug 17, 2018)

*WHO Expects Ebola To Spread In Congo In Areas Too Dangerous To Send Workers...*




*WHO Expects Ebola To Spread In Congo In Areas Too Dangerous To Send Workers*
_August 17, 2018 • The World Health Organization says violence and insecurity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's North Kivu region is preventing health workers from stopping the spread of Ebola._


> The World Health Organization said Friday that security concerns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's North Kivu region were preventing aid workers from reaching certain areas — and leaving open the possibility of the Ebola virus spreading.  At least 1,500 people could be exposed to the virus, WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic told reporters in Geneva, according to Reuters.  Congo's health ministry declared an outbreak of Ebola on Aug. 1 in the North Kivu region. As of Wednesday, the WHO reports 51 confirmed cases and 27 probable cases of Ebola in the region, with 44 people (17 confirmed, 27 probable) having died of the disease.  "We don't know if we are having all transmission chains identified. We expect to see more cases as a result of earlier infections and infection developing into illness," Jasarevic reportedly said. "We still don't have a full epidemiological picture. ... The worst-case scenario is that we have these security blind spots where the epidemic could take hold that we don't know about," the wire service quoted him as saying.
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> North Kivu — "a lawless, mineral-rich area in the northeast of the country," as NPR's Jason Beaubien describes it — is home to 8 million people.  "Over the last decade armed groups in North Kivu have massacred civilians and each other while vying for control of the province's deposits of gold, diamond and coltan, an ore used in cellphones and other electronics," Beaubien reports.  The WHO says the area "has been experiencing intense insecurity and worsening humanitarian crisis, with over one million internally displaced people and a continuous efflux of refugees to the neighbouring countries, including Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania."
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> About 1,500 miles away in the DRC's northwest Équateur province, the WHO had just declared a previous Ebola outbreak over on July 24. It said the next day that 33 people had died in that outbreak that had been declared in early May — a relative success compared with the devastating outbreak in 2014 through 2016 in West Africa that left more than 11,300 people dead.  The WHO's response in May involved the first widespread use of the experimental Ebola vaccine rVSV-ZEBOV since testing started in 2015.  On Friday, the WHO said more than 500 people, including health workers, had been vaccinated against the disease in the North Kivu outbreak.
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> WHO Expects Ebola To Spread In Congo In Areas Too Dangerous To Send Workers


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## waltky (Aug 17, 2018)

*Antibodies Could Knock Out Ebola Virus...*
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*Antibodies Could Knock Out Ebola Virus*
*August 17, 2018 - In 1995, a patient sick with the Ebola virus, in what was then called Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, miraculously recovered from this deadly disease. At that time, when the virus first jumped from animals to man, Ebola meant almost certain death.*



> *Doctors found that this patient had antibodies to fight the virus in his bloodstream even after he recovered.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, invited the patient to the U.S., where researchers cloned the cell that had helped him beat Ebola.  "We brought the person back to the United States to draw his blood and try to clone the B cells that make the antibodies that this person had produced ... to then, essentially, clear his virus and, hopefully, protect him against any future exposure," Fauci told VOA.*
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> *Because the NIH scientists made numerous copies of that cell, it is called a monoclonal antibody — in this case, mAB114. It's hoped that it can be used to target the Zaire strain of Ebola currently spreading in eastern Congo.  Fauci said mAB114 is still experimental.  "We have done a number of tests in an animal model and have shown that when you infect an animal up to five days after they become infected, and you passively transfer this antibody, you can actually protect the animals from getting sick and they recover," he said.  Not all treatments that work in animals work in humans.*
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