Volunteers’ anger at restrictions imposed on their return home from west Africa
THE GUARDIAN by Tracy Mcveigh Dec. 21, 2014
As the latest of the six British-built Ebola treatment centres in west Africa admitted its first three patients this weekend, some of the volunteer NHS staff working there over Christmas said they felt insulted by a draconian ramping up of the protocols they have been told they will have to follow when they return to the UK.
A British health worker puts on protective clothes at a Red Cross clinic in eastern Sierra Leone. Photograph: Baz Ratner/Reuters
MONROVIA--Turnout for Liberian parliamentary elections on Saturday appeared to be low as concerns about Ebola kept many voters at home.
Bystanders read the headlines illustrating the battle over the holding of elections in Liberia amid the Ebola crisis at a street side chalkboard newspaper in Monrovia, December 2, 2014. Credit: Reuters/James Giahyue
Polling stations were largely empty after voting began at 8 a.m. (3.00 a.m. ET) in the seafront capital Monrovia, with voters occasionally drifting in, despite precautions put in place by the National Elections Commission (NEC).
Staff with temperature guns at polling stations checked voters for any signs of the hemorrhagic fever, which is spread via bodily fluids. Voters were obliged to wash their hands with chlorine solution, to stand at least three feet apart in the queue, and bring their own pens to mark the ballot paper, officials said.
NEW YORK TIMES -- BY Adam Nossiter Dec. 1, 2014 Description of the way that President Alpha Conde, after intially minmizing the Ebola threat, "is mustering a late-career tenacity to confront the deadly epidemic that still infects hundreds in this battered West African nation."
“While shaving I think of Ebola, while eating I think of Ebola,” said President Alpha Condé of Guinea. The response of nearby nations helped galvanize Mr. Condé.Credit Samuel Aranda for The New York Times
U.S. regulators on Thursday suspended trading in four small over-the-counter stocks of companies that they said have been touting the development of products to prevent or treat the Ebola virus, and warned investors to beware of similar scams.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said it had suspended trading in the shares of New York-based Bravo Enterprises Ltd, California-based Immunotech Laboratories Inc, Canada-based Myriad Interactive Media Inc and Wholehealth Products Inc, which is also located in California.
The SEC also issued a warning that "con artists" may be soliciting investors and claiming to be developing treatments or medicine to prevent the deadly virus.
NEW YORK TIMES Nov. 20, 2014 By Donald G. McNeil Jr.
The global response to the Ebola virus in Liberia is being hampered by poor coordination and serious disagreements between Liberian officials and the donors and health agencies fighting the epidemic, according to minutes of top-level meetings and interviews with participants. Medical workers handling a blood sample of an Ebola victim as the girl, 9, lay in a shawl in Monrovia, Liberia. She later died.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
THE HILL Nov. 12, 2014 Commentary by Claire Pomeroy, M.D., M.B.A, President of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation.
...Without a commitment by Congress to fund basic medical research, the lives of millions are put at risk, along with the nation’s economic and national security. Outbreaks of deadly viruses – including AIDS or Ebola – have shown us the costs of not remaining vigilant.
So how much funding is enough? It’s time for us to have that national conversation once again. We do not know what the superbugs of tomorrow will look like. But we do know that novel pathogens will emerge or existing ones will mutate, and that as global travel and migration inexorably increase, disease knows no border. It is time for us to stop chasing at AIDS and Ebola from behind, and take stock of our capacity to commit.
WASHINGTON — Beneath the calming reassurance that President Obama has repeatedly offered during the Ebola crisis, there is a deepening frustration, even anger, with how the government has handled key elements of the response.
Those frustrations spilled over when Mr. Obama convened his top aides in the Cabinet room after canceling his schedule on Wednesday. Medical officials were providing information that later turned out to be wrong. Guidance to local health teams was not adequate. It was unclear which Ebola patients belonged in which threat categories.
BETHESDA, Md. -- As the federal government frantically works to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and as it responds to a second diagnosis of the disease at home, one of the country's top health officials says a vaccine likely would have already been discovered were it not for budget cuts.
Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has "slowed down" research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.
"NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and thought, 'Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'" Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."
By JONATHAN PAYE-LAYLEH and ROBBIE COREY-BOULET Associated Press
MONROVIA -- Liberian lawmakers on Friday rejected a proposal to grant President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf the power to further restrict movement and public gatherings and to confiscate property in the fight against Ebola. One legislator said such a law would have turned Liberia into a police state.
The proposal's defeat came as the World Health Organization once again raised the death toll attributed to the Ebola outbreak. The Geneva-based U.N. agency said that 4,033 confirmed, probable or suspected Ebola deaths have now been recorded.
Liberians stage a protest yesterrday outside the National Assembly against the government not doing enough to fight Ebola virus in Monrovia, Liberia. (AP Photo/Abbas Dulleh)
All but nine of them were in the three worst-affected countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Eight of the rest were in Nigeria, with one patient dying in the United States....
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