NEW YORK TIMES by Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group Dec. 11, 2014
MONROVIA, Liberia — In my career as a medical doctor and global health policy maker, I have been in the middle of monumental struggles, including fights to make treatment accessible in the developing world for those living with H.I.V./AIDS as well as multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. But the Ebola epidemic is the worst I’ve ever seen...
Members of District 13 ambulance service disinfect a room in a village north of Monrovia, Liberia.Credit Jerome Delay/Associated Press
In an editorial published online today in the International Journal of Epidemiology, experts from the Departments of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at Columbia University, New York, are calling for survivors of the Ebola epidemic to be mobilised in a bid to hasten containment of the disease.
We already know that the current Ebola outbreak is unique in its magnitude and for its dispersion in dense, mobile populations. Physicians and nurses face high mortality, and foreign aid in the form of medical supplies and staff continues to be unequal to the scope of the problem. With a case recovery rate of around 30% at the present time in West Africa, survivors already number in the thousands.
Health care workers have more than 100 times the risk of catching Ebola in Sierra Leone as the general public there does, according to a new report.
And it's not necessarily down to failed protective measures in hospitals. Health care workers form their own community, and when one gets sick or dies, he or she can infect fellow medics, the report finds.
The World Health Organization has been saying that health care workers such as doctors and nurses are at special risk of Ebola. It says 622 health-care workers have been infected and 346 of them have died in all the affected countries.
Dr. Peter Kilmarx of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who led an investigation into the high infection rate in Sierra Leone...said "We think of health care worker infections as a failure of personal protective equipment.,"But there are so many different ways that they are exposed there."
REUTERS By Stephanie Nebehay Dec. 9, 2014 GENEVA --More foreign health workers are needed to help tackle the Ebola epidemic, which is spreading quickly in western Sierra Leone and deep in the forested interior of Guinea, a senior U.N. official said on Tuesday.
A woman walks pass an Ebola virus awareness campaign poster in Monrovia, December 8, 2014. Credit: Reuters/James Giahyue
The death toll from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has risen to 6,331 in the three worst hit countries, with Sierra Leone overtaking Liberia as the country with the highest number of cases, the World Health Organization says.
"We know the outbreak is still flaming strongly in western Sierra Leone and some parts of the interior of Guinea. We can't rest, we have to still push on," said David Nabarro, the U.N. Special Envoy on Ebola.
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