Ebola

Brantly receives a blood donation from a 14-year-old Ebola survivor in Liberia while awaiting ZMapp, the first person in the current Ebola outbreak to receive the treatment.

The Ebola crisis in Liberia worsens after the evacuation of some international medics from Liberia following the infection of two US health workers with the Ebola virus. The overcrowded and understaffed Elwa hospital in the capital, Monrovia, where Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol worked, has been forced to turn away some Ebola cases.

The CDC  is planning, over the next month,  to send 50 epidemiologists, experts of health communication and other service personnel to Sierra Leone and Guinea, which are the hardest hit countries, amid increasing fears of the spread of the deadly Ebola virus to other countries. Dr. Tom Friednen,  CDC director:

These individuals will help countries establish emergency operations centers that can develop a structured and effective way of addressing the outbreak.

The World Health Organisation announces it is convening a special meeting next week to explore using experimental drugs in the West African outbreak, after two health workers from the US charity Samaritan’s Purse are treated with a drug called ZMapp. The decision to use an experimental drug to treat two Americans infected with Ebola, while nearly 1 000 Africans have already died from the deadly epidemic, has sparked controversy, but US experts say it is ethically justified.

The experimental drug is still in an extremely early phase of development and had only been tested previously on monkeys. It has never been produced on a large scale. There is no proven treatment or cure for Ebola. Samaritan’s Purse members Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, however, have shown improvements since taking the drug.

A federal Customs and Border Protection agent says the arrival of a sick passenger believed to be from Liberia last Saturday caused confusion at Newark. The flight arrived at the gate and most passengers were allowed into the customs hall, while the sick passenger was taken to a hospital. For a low-level bomb scare, the plane is parked away from the airport.Airport managers went on the public address system and asked the passengers to separate themselves from people who had been on other flights and were not exposed to the vomiting patient.

A panic ensued. It was a disaster

Harvard Medical School associate professor of Global Health and Social Medicine Dr. Scott Podolsky writes in Annals of Internal Medicine that ZMapp is inspired by serology techniques developed in the 1890s after Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch began to identify the agents of diseases like anthrax, diptheria and pneumonia:

From the 1890s onward, this model of production – expose an animal (guinea pig, rabbit, cow, horse, etc.) to an identified microbial pathogen, generate antibodies (or use convalescent serum from former patients), and then ‘passively’ transfer the pre-formed antibodies to an exposed animal or person – could be expanded to such feared and prevalent diseases as pneumococcal pneumonia and meningococcal meningitis.

A health care facility in Monrovia, Liberia is attacked, causing a number of patients to flee the facility, all of them infected with Ebola. Some patients chose not to leave. The perpetrators made off with mattresses and equipment. No injuries have been reported. Liberian National Police:

It was an attack from people afraid of Ebola

Kenya will be closing its borders on Wednesday August 20 to people travelling from Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia due to the spread of the virus. Kenya is at high risk as it is a major transport hub. Kenya’s health secretary said Kenyans and medical workers flying in from those states would still be allowed in. Kenyan Airways says it will stop flights to Liberia and Sierra Leone when the ban comes in. Kenyan Health Minister James Macharia said it was “in the interest of public health” and warned that Kenyans and health workers who had returned from the three west African states would face “strict checks” and would be quarantined if necessary.