Ebola: will it adapt to become more easily transmissible?

[Anonymous]

The situation in Liberia, in particular, has gone from bad to worse to dreadful to now, abysmal.

http://frontpageafricaonline.com/index.php/politic/2679-danger-lurks-in-monrovia-21-ebola-patients-flee-west-point-isolation

Patients (infectious) have fled or been carried away from the isolation centers; a mob of angry citizens have stormed the center and removed contaminated bedding, mattresses, etc (to be used in their own homes, presumably) and the infection will surely spread 100 fold to the densely populated neighborhood of West Point.

Besides being a humanitarian crisis of the greatest order in and of itself, will this event be the outbreak that will cause Ebola to become more efficient at spreading from human to human? With each opportunity to infect people, are there more and more chances of its evolution?

[Anonymous]

Sure but no one knows how it will evolve. We like to think we won't be affected or that we could contain it here but it seems to have so much potential to continue spreading through all the countries with poorer and often abysmal health care systems in Africa and Asia that it will have plenty of time to evolve. It's not appearing to burn out at all, just spread at this point. Obviously deaths are seriously under-reported right now - there's no infrastructure to adequately monitor it. International travel means just a matter of time until it's here.

[Anonymous]

Ebola seems to have fallen off the radar, with Ferguson and then Robin Williams' death.

[Anonymous]

Of course. Didn't you see Outbreak?

[Anonymous]

Read the Hot Zone. Happened 25 years ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ebola seems to have fallen off the radar, with Ferguson and then Robin Williams' death.

That's true. Canada is still paying attention.


Raid sparks new Ebola fears as patients flee, bloody sheets stolen | Toronto Star

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/08/17/raid_sparks_new_ebola_fears_as_patients_flee_bloody_sheets_stolen.html

Sunday, August 17, 2014

MONROVIA, LIBERIA—Liberian officials fear Ebola could soon spread through the capital’s largest slum after residents raided a quarantine centre for suspected patients and took items including bloody sheets and mattresses.

The violence in the West Point slum occurred late Saturday and was led by residents angry that patients were brought to the holding centre from other parts of Monrovia, Tolbert Nyenswah, assistant health minister, said Sunday.

Up to 30 patients were staying at the centre and many of them fled at the time of the raid, said Nyenswah. Once they are located they will be transferred to the Ebola centre at Monrovia’s largest hospital, he said.

West Point residents went on a “looting spree,” stealing items from the clinic that were likely infected, said a senior police official, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the press. The residents took medical equipment and mattresses and sheets that had bloodstains, he said. Ebola is spread through bodily fluids including blood, vomit, feces and sweat.

“All between the houses you could see people fleeing with items looted from the patients,” the official said, adding that he now feared “the whole of West Point will be infected.”

Some of the looted items were visibly stained with blood, vomit and excrement, said Richard Kieh, who lives in the area.

[Anonymous]

SOS FROM LIBERIA: WHO, OTHERS MUST STEP IN BEFORE WE ALL DIE

Written by FPA Editorial

Published: 17 August 2014

http://frontpageafricaonline.com/index.php/politic/2680-an-sos-from-liberia-who-others-must-intervene-before-we-all-die

Judging from what happened in Monrovia last week, self-seeking presidential aides and kitchen Cabinet officials will shortly conclude and run to the president to say that this is a call for an interim government. IT IS NOT!!!.

This is an honest and sincere appeal to international humanitarian groups and the WHO to move in and for the president to dissolve her "Special Ebola Task Force because they have all failed and appear incapable of solving this plague killing our people and flirting with anarchy.

THIS IS AN URGENT SOS call to the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and every international humanitarian organization to please intervene in Liberia before Africa’s oldest republic loses its entire population.

THE UNITED NATIONS must immediately call for the disbandment of the Liberian government task force and replace it with an international medical and management team capable of righting the wrongs by the post-war nation’s health system and saving many more Liberians from losing their lives.

WHAT HAPPENED last Saturday at a makeshift Ebola center in West Point is from our perspective the last straw that has broken whatever back this country or its government had in curbing further spread and containing this deadly plague that has so far killed more than 2000 people in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, since it emerged in February.

WHEN RESIDENTS in one of Liberia’s most populous and disease-infected areas run amok against an initiative undertaken by a volunteer nurse, who simply tried to do right for his people with a self-initiative isolation center because the government had turned its backs on the people, it is time for the international players to step in.

(snip)

BLAIR GLENCORSE AND BROOKS HARMON, writing in the current edition of Foreign Policy magazine said it rightly: “The Ebola crisis is quickly exposing how rapidly progress can be undermined, however, when it is not grounded in a fair, inclusive social compact between governments and their citizens. It is no coincidence that, in the countries at the heart of the outbreak, large groups of people have been systematically excluded from power and decision-making at all levels for decades. This means many citizens are unwilling to believe that the government can serve their interests. The health system in Liberia is a case in point. Despite millions of dollars of investment in the decade before the Ebola outbreak, there were only 150 trained doctors in the entire country of 3.5 million people. As a result, access to services is inevitably exclusionary, lending itself to networks of corruption as patients do anything they can to receive care.”

WHEN THE CASUALTY numbers in neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea where the outbreak started, continue to drop and Liberia’s numbers continue to climb, it is time for international players to step in.

WHEN AFTER watching all of the colleagues die and isolated by a government which failed to provide simple gloves and mask, which nurse or doctor in the right mind would want to return to work when a government makes promises to make conditions better in the absence of insurance or a guarantee to healthworkers family that they will be taken care of in the event of death?

(snip)

THIS IS NOT a Brad Pitt fighting zombies in the movie, World War Z; or Morgan Freeman and Dustin Freeman on opposing sides of a deadly plague in Outbreak; or even Matt Damon fighting to save his family and the world in the Ebola-like Contagion movie. This is Liberia on the verge of extinction, if the world sits idly by and wait for this Liberian government which has been given all the goodwill and international aid, to get it right.

_________________

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:SOS FROM LIBERIA: WHO, OTHERS MUST STEP IN BEFORE WE ALL DIE

Written by FPA Editorial

Published: 17 August 2014

http://frontpageafricaonline.com/index.php/politic/2680-an-sos-from-liberia-who-others-must-intervene-before-we-all-die

Judging from what happened in Monrovia last week, self-seeking presidential aides and kitchen Cabinet officials will shortly conclude and run to the president to say that this is a call for an interim government. IT IS NOT!!!.

THIS IS NOT a Brad Pitt fighting zombies in the movie, World War Z; or Morgan Freeman and Dustin Freeman on opposing sides of a deadly plague in Outbreak; or even Matt Damon fighting to save his family and the world in the Ebola-like Contagion movie. This is Liberia on the verge of extinction, if the world sits idly by and wait for this Liberian government which has been given all the goodwill and international aid, to get it right.

_________________

Kitchen cabinet officials???

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Kitchen cabinet officials???

unofficial, non-elected advisors.

[Anonymous]

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news-stories/field-news/response-west-africa-ebola-epidemic-remains-dangerously-inadequate

August 15, 2014

Despite the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration that the largest-recorded Ebola hemorrhagic fever epidemic is an “international health emergency,” the global effort to stem the outbreak is dangerously inadequate.

The number of deaths and cases is continuing to increase dramatically in Liberia and Sierra Leone, precipitating a public health crisis in the two West African countries. Meanwhile, the outbreak is continuing to affect people in Guinea, where it originated in March, with new suspected cases continuing to be admitted to medical facilities.

The WHO and states must provide immediate support to the governments of Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. An immediate and massive international mobilization of medical resources—human and technical—to Liberia and Sierra Leone is required to assist these countries.

It is clear that the Ebola epidemic will not be contained without a massive deployment of medical and disaster relief specialists. The governments of Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone are doing everything they can to try to fight this epidemic. Their doctors and nurses have been dying and risking their lives on the front line of this outbreak. They desperately need international support.

Providing funds is not enough. Available infectious disease experts and disaster relief specialists from countries with these capacities must deploy teams to the affected countries. In addition to a larger deployment of medical and epidemiological specialists, additional laboratory capacity for Ebola testing is required, along with ambulances and helicopters to safely transport samples and suspected cases., Supplies to ensure safe burials are also needed immediately.

Immense social and economic impact

Many of the patients who have died are between 30 and 45 years old. There are villages in Kailahun in Sierra Leone, for example, which have lost the majority of the adult members of the community, leaving many orphaned children and elderly people. In some villages there is hardly anybody left to cultivate fields or provide for families.

Liberia

The situation is catastrophic and is deteriorating on daily in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. At one point last week, all five of the main hospitals in the city were closed. Some have since reopened but are barely functioning.

There has been no improvement in the overall coordination of the response to the epidemic. Hospitals and almost all health centers in the city of close to one million inhabitants remain closed. The number of dead is outstripping the capacity for health officials to manage safe burials, and more and more health workers have been infected with Ebola over recent weeks. There is a dire need for the WHO, countries, and other international organizations to mobilize to support the Liberian Ministry of Health.

“The scale of this outbreak is getting bigger every day,” said Lindis Hurum, MSF emergency coordinator in Liberia. “The Liberian health system just cannot cope with the scale of the epidemic. The outbreak has affected every facet of the Liberian society. This disease is very democratic in that sense.”

“We have exhausted our available pool of experienced medical staff and cannot scale up our response any further,” said Hurum. “We desperately need the WHO, countries, and other aid agencies to deploy staff to the field. We are Doctors Without Borders, but not without limits.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Read the Hot Zone. Happened 25 years ago.

Yes, Ebola went airborn in Reston, VA years ago. Luckily though, the Reston strain was only deadly to primates and not humans. But, it could definitely happen again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ebola seems to have fallen off the radar, with Ferguson and then Robin Williams' death.[/quote

ain't it the truth!

Before Ebola, it was Israel and Palestine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Read the Hot Zone. Happened 25 years ago.

Yes, Ebola went airborn in Reston, VA years ago. Luckily though, the Reston strain was only deadly to primates and not humans. But, it could definitely happen again.

Humans are primates. It was only deadly to monkeys. A few humans were infected, but had no ill effects. It is kind of cool to work in a town with its own strain of ebola.

[Anonymous]

It is only a matter of time before it hits our shores.

The natives has gotten restless and have gone off the reservation...looting and stealing feces and blood covered sheets and mattresses. Talk about Darwin award winners!!!

[Anonymous]

Who the F steals mattresses and sheets soiled with blood/vomit/stool??

Those people deserve to get Ebola and die, I just feel sorry for the people they infect before they do.