WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. regulators on Tuesday allowed emergency use of the first rapid coronavirus test that can be performed entirely at home and delivers results in 30 minutes.
abcnews.go.com - by Morgan Winsor - October 31, 2019
The United Nations migration agency has halted Ebola screenings at five border crossings in East Africa after three of its aid workers were killed.
The International Organization for Migration said several of its volunteers were caught in the crossfire during clashes between rival groups on Saturday morning in South Sudan's Central Equatoria region. Two men and one woman died, and two male volunteers sustained non-life-threatening injuries.
. . . In recent months, a surge in violence in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger – three Sahelian countries with shared borders and common problems – has left more than 440,000 people displaced and 5,000 dead, as militants – some with links to al-Qaeda and IS – extend their grip across the region.
As they gain ground, the jihadists are stoking conflicts between different ethnic groups that are accused of either supporting or opposing them, putting the region’s entire social fabric into question. Cycles of inter-communal violence are now claiming more lives and uprooting more people than direct jihadist attacks. Nobody seems able to stop it.
FOREIGN POLICY by Siobhán O'Grady April 13, 2015 When the Ebola virus spread from Guinea to Sierra Leone and Liberia last spring, the initial international response was labeled a failure. By the time President Barack Obama ordered troops to the affected countries in September, more than 2,400 people were dead.
But in the United States, where major hospitals prepared for an outbreak, there were only four in-country diagnoses, one of which resulted in a death. And some see the urgency of that response as a lesson in how the government can prepare for another public health hazard: a bioterrorist attack.
Arizona Rep. Martha McSally chairs a House subcommittee that will examine over the next few months the threat of bioterrorist attacks and U.S. preparedness to respond to them. She told Foreign Policy that even if a disease outbreak and the use of a biological agent in a coordinated attack are not completely analogous, the response strains similar systems.
“We can learn lessons from other outbreaks that are naturally occurring,” she said. “We can identify weaknesses in our response and even if it wasn’t terrorism, it presses the system at the same level....”
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