directrelief.org - by Tony Morain - October 16, 2014

Direct Relief sent its 19th emergency shipment of Ebola supplies today to the Ministry of Health in Guinea (photos and videos found here). Weighing roughly 3,000 pounds, the shipment contains laboratory testing equipment from BD (blood collection sets), face masks, and medical gloves. In total, Direct Relief has delivered 140 tons of medical aid to Ebola-hit regions since the outbreak erupted in spring. 47 companies have contributed to these efforts through in-kind or financial contributions.

More broadly, Direct Relief is continuing to receive urgent requests from local health facilities in West Africa for essential medicines to treat non-Ebola (and treatable) illnesses that may be causing more deaths than Ebola itself.

AFP                                                    Oct. 16, 2014

WASHINGTON - An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo this year came from a different source than the epidemic raging across West Africa, scientists said Wednesday.

Even though the two deadly Ebola outbreaks have separate animal origins, the report in the New England Journal of Medicine nevertheless raises concern about the emergence of the often fatal hemorrhagic fever across the African continent.

A Congolese barber  cuts hair in Lokolia, on October 6, 2014, despite the authorities' order to avoid physical contact to stop the spread of Ebola (AFP Photo/Kathy Katayi)

Ebola was first identified in 1976, and had returned in waves. The latest outbreak in West Africa is history's largest, killing more than 4,400 people since the beginning of the year.

A separate, smaller outbreak in the DRC began over the summer, and has killed 49 people of the 69 believed infected between late July and October 7, the NEJM report said.

An analysis of the virus's genome showed that it is a type called Ebola Zaire, and is 99.2 percent related to a 1995 variant that emerged in Kikwit in the DRC.

FRANCE 4 INTERNATIONAL NEWS          OCT. 16, 2014

PARIS French health officials tday said screening measures for Ebola among passengers arriving from Guinea would start Saturday at Charles de Gualle airport in Paris.

 France became the fourth country –after Britain, the United States and Canada–to announce screening checks for the virus at its main international airport, as the United Nations warned Ebola was outpacing efforts to combat the epidemic.

The announcement came as Spanish authorities said they had isolated an Air France plane at Madrid airport and activated emergency health procedures after one of the passengers was reported to have a fever and shivers in what is being treated as a suspected Ebola case, officials said Thursday.

... French President François Hollande held a video conference Wednesday with his US counterpart Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Italian premier Matteo Renzi to discuss their response to the virus.

EU health ministers are meeting in Brussels on Thursday to discuss measures to deal with the epidemic....

See full story

http://www.france24.com/en/20141016-ebola-france-airport-screening-eu-health/

NEW YORK TIMES                            OCT. 15, 2014
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR                              

President Obamaon Wednesday directed his aides to monitor the spread of Ebola in the United States “in a much more aggressive way,” but said the American people should remain confident in the government’s ability to prevent a widespread outbreak of the deadly disease.

After a two-hour meeting of cabinet-level officials who are in charge of the government’s response to the virus, Mr. Obama promised that a review of the recent Ebola cases in Dallas would determine what went wrong that allowed two nurses to be infected.

With a video link to Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, the president said he had ordered health officials to determine, “How we are going to make sure that something like this isn’t repeated.”

LIBERIA: ANALYSIS OF EBOLA'S IMPACT ON THE ECONOMY

WASHINGTON POST                           OCT. 15, 2014

By Ylan Q. Mui
MONROVIA                                      

"  the (Ebola) tragedy encompasses not only those who lost their lives and their families, but also the dreams of a country that was on the cusp on an economic resurgence. With critical public works projects in limbo and businesses struggling, the virus is threatening Liberia’s chance to escape generations of poverty and join Africa’s rising prosperity.

“Liberia was moving,” said Estrada Bernard, chairman of the International Bank in Liberia and the Liberian president’s brother-in-law. “'The whole thing hinges upon how well we can get this virus under control.'”

People do business at the Waterside local market in the center of Monrovia, Liberia, over the summer. Just as their economies had begun to recover from the man-made horror of coups and civil war, the West African nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have been knocked back down by the Ebola virus. (AP Photo/Abbas Dulleh, File)

WASHINGTON POST                 

By Dan Lamothe                       October 15, 2014

The U.S. military continues to grow the force it is deploying to western Africa to assist with the Ebola virus crisis, but it will take until late November or early December to complete all 17 treatment units it has planned, a two-star general said.

Army Maj. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, commander of U.S. Army Africa, told reporters in a phone conference from Liberia on Tuesday that the “lion’s share” of the treatment units will be complete by late November, with a few lagging into December. That exceeds an estimate provided by his commanding officer, Gen. David Rodriguez, who said Oct. 7 that the effort would likely take until mid-November.

The effort has been hampered by heavy rains, among other obstacles.

WASHINGTON POST                           Oct. 15, 2014

By Abby Phillip and Fred Barbash

A second Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital worker who tested positive for Ebola flew on a commercial flightfrom Cleveland to Dallas on Monday, the day before she reported symptoms of the virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The health worker, who has not been named, cared for an Ebola-stricken Liberian man at the hospital, then tested positive for the disease in a preliminary test, Texas health officials announced Wednesday morning.

She flew on Frontier Airlines Flight 1143 at around 6 p.m. on Oct. 13. There were 132 passengers on board, according to the airline and health officials. The CDC said it is working to reach out those passengers and is also asking them to call a hotline.

The agency and the airline also said that the health-care worker did not exhibit any symptoms while on the flight. A person infected with Ebola is only contagious once the person becomes symptomatic.

See full story

EMORY AND NEBRASKA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTERS SHARE DETAILS OF THEIR PROCEDURES WITH OTHER HOSPITALS

TIME MAGAZINE                                                                     Oct. 14, 2014

By Alexandra Sifferlin

Physicians who are treating patients with the Ebola virus at Emory University Hospital and the University of Nebraska Medical Center shared their advice and protocols with worried hospitals and health care providers over a phone conference on Tuesday. Whether the conference really quelled these fears, however, was not exactly clear.

The intent of the conference, which was organized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was to answer health care questions related to admitting and treating a patient with Ebola. There’s growing concern among health officials that hospitals without specialized isolation units and with little experience treating serious communicable diseases may not be fully prepared to treat the disease....

Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, seen in August 2014. Jessica McGowan—Getty Images

Officials work to decontaminate the apartment of the second healthcare worker diagnosed with Ebola.
(Photo: Maj. Max Geron, Dallas Police Department)

A second person involved in the care of Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan has contracted the disease. The news follows a scathing report by a nurses union that Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital had "no protocol" in place to care for Duncan.

usatoday.com - by Rick Jervis and Doug Stanglin - October 15, 2014

DALLAS — A second hospital worker who helped care for Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan has tested positive for the disease, prompting local officials to warn Wednesday that more cases "is a real possibility."

The unidentified health-care worker, who was described as a woman who lived alone without pets, reported a fever Tuesday and was immediately isolated at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.

At an early morning news conference, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said he could not rule out more cases among 75 other hospital staffers who cared for Duncan and were being monitored by the CDC.

ASSOCIATED PRESS                    Oct. 15, 2010

DALLAS — A second health care worker at a Dallas hospital who provided care for the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the U.S. has tested positive for the disease, the Texas Department of State Health Services said Wednesday.

The department said in a statement that the worker reported a fever Tuesday and was immediately isolated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Health officials said the worker was among those who took care of Thomas Eric Duncan, who was diagnosed with Ebola after coming to the U.S. from Liberia. Duncan died Oct. 8.

The department said a preliminary Ebola test was conducted late Tuesday at a state public health laboratory in Austin, Texas, and came back positive during the night. Confirmatory testing was being conducted at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Read full story

http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/national/southwest/2014/10/texas_dept_2nd_health_care_worker_tests_positive_for_ebola

dfw.cbslocal.com - October 14, 2014

DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) - Two weeks after the first Ebola diagnosis on American soil, the Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Thomas Frieden says the organization should have sent a larger response team to insure the virus did not spread to anyone else.

Learning from past mistakes, the CDC has now established an “Ebola response team” that will travel to any place where Ebola is diagnosed, should there be another case identified in the country.  Such a team is now on the ground in Dallas, said Frieden.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Cluster of Ebola Cases Among Liberian and U.S. Health Care Workers in an Ebola Treatment Unit and Adjacent Hospital — Liberia, 2014

cdc.gov - Early Release - October 14, 2014

Environmental-Cleaning Guys sprayed disinfectant Sunday outside the apartment complex on Marquita Street where the nurse who contracted Ebola lives. The hospital parking lot she uses and her car were also decontaminated, officials said.  Jim Tuttle/Staff Photographer

dallasnews.com - by Jeffrey Weiss - October 14, 2014

Ebola care instructions at a Dallas hospital and across the country were changed by federal officials on Monday — a tacit admission that training and procedures used for America’s first case of the disease had come up short.

The changes were prompted by the discovery that a nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas had become infected while treating Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died of Ebola in the hospital last Wednesday.

The transmission of the deadly virus to the nurse “doesn’t change the fact that it’s possible to take care of Ebola safely. But it does change substantially how we approach it,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control, because even a single infection is unacceptable.”

FIERCE BOIOTECH RESEARCH                       Oct. 14, 2014
By Emily Mullin

Before the current Ebola outbreak, the virus had only appeared in Africa in fits and starts since its discovery in 1976, receding back into the jungle almost as quickly as it arrived. This relative rarity and the swiftness with which the disease kills its victims has, up until now, made Ebola an unattractive--not to mention daunting--prospect for drug developers. As a result, no approved drugs or vaccines against Ebola exist.

...the current situation in West Africa... has prompted the World Health Organization to call on international government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry to work together to speed up the development of promising therapies for experimental use for those most at risk of contracting the disease, which causes severe hemorrhagic fever.

Now, a handful of players are racing to get a treatment or vaccine to patients as quickly as possible, even though these drugs remain largely untested in humans.... 

Here is a list of organizations that are in the global spotlight right now with their investigational Ebola program

See full story and list

NEW YORK TIMES                                                                                        OCT. 14, 2014

By SABRINA TAVERNISE                        

During a tense discussion, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank president, spoke sharply to Dr. Margaret Chan, the head of the World Health Organization, the agency in charge. You have the authority to act in this emergency, he told her, according to people familiar with the meeting, “so why aren’t you doing it?”