Resilience - Conakry

By Lenny Bernstein - Sep 20 2014 - washingtonpost.com

MONROVIA, Liberia — While the terrifying spread of Ebola has captured the world’s attention, it also has produced a lesser-known crisis: the near-collapse of the already fragile health-care system here, a development that may be as dangerous — for now — as the virus for the average Liberian.

Western experts said that people here are dying of preventable or treatable conditions such as malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia and the effects of high blood pressure and diabetes, such as strokes. Where services do exist, Ebola has complicated the effort to provide them by stoking fear among health-care workers, who sometimes turn away sick people or women in labor if they can’t determine whether the patient is infected. And some people, health-care workers said, will not seek care, fearful that they will become infected with Ebola at a clinic or hospital.

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By Lena H. Sun & Juliet Eilperin - Sep 7 - The Washington Post

President Obama said Sunday that the U.S. military will begin aiding what has been a chaotic and ineffective response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, arguing that it represents a serious national security concern.

The move significantly ramps up the U.S. response and comes as the already strained military is likely to be called upon further to address militant threats in the Middle East. The decision to involve the military in providing equipment and other assistance for international health workers in Africa comes after mounting calls from some unlikely groups — most prominently the international medical organization Doctors Without Borders — demonstrating to the White House the urgency of the issue.

By Danny Gold - Sep 19, 2014 - vice.com

Paul M. Goi waited outside of the Redemption Hospital, a treatment center serving as a holding area for Ebola patients in Monrovia, Liberia, with his sick sister-in-law in the backseat of his station wagon. She had been vomiting, and he assumed that she had caught the Ebola virus. Across the street, inside an ambulance were other members of his family, including his daughter and granddaughter. They, too, were believed to be sick with Ebola.

"I'm very frustrated," Goi told VICE News. "I had been calling the ambulances since Sunday to come pick them up, and none came." Now that he had finally managed to get his sick relatives picked up and taken to the hospital, there was simply no room. All he wanted was answers, he said.

https://news.vice.com/article/left-to-die-liberias-ebola-victims-have-nowhere-to-turn-as-treatment-centers-overflow

By Catharine Paddock PhD - Medical News Today - Updated: 3 Sep 2014 3am PST

The World Health Organization have announced that the Ebola virus in the new outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is not derived from strains circulating in the current outbreak in West Africa. 

"Results from virus characterization, together with findings from the epidemiological investigation, are definitive: the outbreak in DRC is a distinct and independent event, with no relationship to the outbreak in West Africa," says a situation statement the World Health Organization (WHO) released on Tuesday.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/281948.php