CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - Reversion of advanced Ebola virus disease in nonhuman primates with ZMapp

washingtonpost.com - by Lenny Bernstein - August 29, 2014

The experimental drug pressed into emergency use in the West African Ebola epidemic cured a group of 18 monkeys of the deadly disease, including some who didn't receive the treatment until five days after they were injected with the virus, researchers reported Friday.

The finding, published online in the journal Nature, raises new hope for use of the cocktail of monoclonal antibodies, called ZMapp, against Ebola, which has no known cure or vaccine. . .

. . . "The highlight of these experimental results is undoubtedly ZMapp, which was able to reverse severe [Ebola] disease...leading to full recovery of all treated [non-human primates]" within 28 days after they were infected, the researchers wrote.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Craig Kenzie, Junko Otaki, and Luca Zaliani are among the 57 international health care workers assisting with Ebola treatment at a Médecins Sans Frontières facility in Kailahun, Sierra Leone.  Photographs by Samuel Aranda

Foreign and local caregivers are essential to stopping the virus’s deadly spread.

nationalgeographic.com - by Karen Weintraub - August 29, 2014

In two Land Rovers, one fitted out as an ambulance, a small team of humanitarian workers last week headed deep into Sierra Leone's jungle. After hours on deeply rutted paths that could barely be called roads, they stopped at a village that had seen ten reported cases of Ebola.

With the consent of the village chief, the team fanned out across the community, asking at each hut if anyone was feeling ill or had made contact with the earlier patients.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

abcnews.go.com - by Katie Moisse - August 28, 2014

U.S. scientists will begin testing an Ebola vaccine in humans next week, health officials announced today. But it could take 11 months to learn whether the vaccine is safe as the virus’ toll in West Africa continues to rise. . .

. . . The experimental vaccine, co-developed by the National Institutes of Health and GlaxoSmithKline, “performed extremely well in protecting nonhuman primates from Ebola infection,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s infectious disease branch, said.

Outbreak likely originated with a single animal-to-human transmission.

nature.com - Erika Check Hayden - August 28, 2014

Augustine Goba and his colleagues have now decoded the genetic sequences of 99 Ebola viruses collected from 78 patients during the first 24 days of the epidemic in Sierra Leone. The work, published online in Science, could help to inform the design of diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, says structural biologist Erica Ollmann Saphire of The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. “This paper is terrific,” she adds.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Doctors work in a laboratory on collected samples of the Ebola virus at the Centre for Disease Control

Australian Broadcasting Corporation - Sarah Sedghi- 29 Aug 2014

. . . An Australian doctor working in Nigeria says the community is on edge and authorities are doing what they can to ensure the outbreak doesn't escalate further. . .

. . . SARAH SEDGHI: Dr Gavin MacGregor-Skinner has just travelled to Nigeria from his base in the United States to help authorities prepare in case the outbreak worsens.

GAVIN MACGREGOR-SKINNER: A lot of people are saying within their communities that if you put me in the hospital, you put me there to die.

He says the community is afraid.

(CLICK HERE FOR AUDIO AND TO READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE)

(ALSO SEE SAME ARTICLE HERE )

DAKAR Aug 29 (Reuters) - The first case of Ebola has been confirmed in Senegal, a major hub for the business and aid community in West Africa, Health Minister Awa Marie Coll Seck told a news conference on Friday.

The minister said the case was a Guinean national who had arrived from the neighbouring West African country, where the deadly virus was first detected in March.

Reporting by Diadie Ba; Writing by Daniel Flynn; Editing by Emma Farge.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Catharine Paddock PhD - 29 August 2014 - medicalnewstoday.com

An international research team has rapidly sequenced 99 Ebola virus genomes collected in the 2014 outbreak. The team, including members from the Broad Institute and Harvard University in the US and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation, hopes the findings will help multidisciplinary, international efforts to understand and contain the unprecedented epidemic that is growing in West Africa.

The researchers report their findings in the journal Science. Five team members died of Ebola virus disease before the manuscript was published, and their fellow authors honor their memory in the study report.

The 99 genomes came from 78 patients diagnosed with Ebola virus disease in Sierra Leone during the first 24 days of the outbreak. Some patients gave more than one sample, allowing the team to see how the virus changed over the course of a single infection.

28 August 2014

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28966258

Nigeria has confirmed its first Ebola death outside Lagos – a doctor in the oil hub of Port Harcourt.

His wife has been put under quarantine, while a further 70 people in the city are under surveillance.

Latest figures show more than 1,550 people have died of Ebola, with at least 3,000 confirmed cases - mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the total number of cases could potentially exceed 20,000.

On the move: This model of West African regional transportation patterns was built using, among other sources, mobile-phone data for Senegal, released by the mobile carrier Orange.

Mobility data from an African mobile-phone carrier could help researchers recommend where to focus health-care efforts.

By David Talbot on August 22, 2014

Published on Aug. 28, 2014

An outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa could amount to 20,000 cases, the World Health organisation says (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention/PA) 

BBC News - 28 August 2014 Last updated at 12:02 GMT

Nigeria has confirmed its first Ebola death outside Lagos – a doctor in the oil hub of Port Harcourt.  His wife has been put under quarantine, while a further 70 people in the city are under surveillance.  Latest figures show more than 1,550 people have died of Ebola, with at least 3,000 confirmed cases - mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.  The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the total number of cases could potentially exceed 20,000.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28966258

reuters.com - By Josephus Olu-Mammah and Umaru Fofana - August 27, 2014

(Reuters) - The worst ever Ebola outbreak is causing enormous damage to West African economies as foreign businessmen quit the region, the African Development Bank said, while a leading medical charity branded the international response "entirely inadequate."

As transport companies suspend services, cutting off the region, governments and economists have warned that the epidemic could crush the fragile economic gains made in Sierra Leone and Liberia following a decade of civil war in the 1990s. . .

. . . Air France, the French network of Air France-KLM said on Wednesday it had suspended flights to Sierra Leone after advice from the French government.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

cell.com - medicinenet.com - nlm.nih.gov - theramatch.com

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 13, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers say they've discovered how the deadly Ebola virus disables the immune system. They hope the findings will prove valuable in efforts to find treatments for the disease taking hundreds of lives in Africa. . .

. . . American researchers found that the Ebola protein VP24 disrupts a cell's natural immune response. They said this action is an important first step on Ebola's path to causing fatal disease, according to the study published Aug. 13 in the journal Cell Host & Microbe.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Ebola Virus VP24 Targets a Unique NLS Binding Site on Karyopherin Alpha 5 to Selectively Compete with Nuclear Import of Phosphorylated STAT1

(ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLES IN THE LINKS BELOW)

A British man infected with the Ebola virus is loaded into a Royal Air Force (RAF) ambulance after being flown home on a C17 plane from Sierra Leone, at Northolt air base outside London, August 24, 2014.  REUTERS/Andrew Winning

af.reuters.com - By Umaru Fofana and Media Coulibaly - August 26, 2014

FREETOWN/KINSHASA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday it had shut a laboratory in Sierra Leone after a health worker there was infected with Ebola, a move that may hamper efforts to boost the global response to the worst ever outbreak of the disease.

. . . The WHO said it had withdrawn staff from the laboratory testing for Ebola at Kailahun -- one of only two in Sierra Leone -- after a Senegalese epidemiologist was infected with Ebola. . .

"It's a temporary measure to take care of the welfare of our remaining workers," WHO spokesperson Christy Feig said, without specifying how long the measure would last. "After our assessment, they will return."

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

A relic of the Middle Ages, quarantines do more harm than good

By Amber Hildebrandt, CBC News Aug 25, 2014 5:00 AM ET

Medical experts say that mass quarantine is rarely if ever effective in stemming the spread of a contagion like Ebola, and the move by Liberia to cordon off a sprawling slum is likely to do more harm than good.