MSF                                                  July 17, 2015

Though Ebola has faded from the news headlines, the epidemic in West Africa continues to claim lives today. Around 30 people become infected each week in Sierra Leone and Guinea – a number that would be considered a major disaster under normal circumstances – and the outbreak has recently re-emerged in Liberia.

• Liberia: After being declared Ebola-free on 9May, six (6) new cases have been confirmed since the re-emergence of the virus at the end of June.
• Guinea: 13 confirmed cases in the country in the week to 12July in three main hotspots (Forecariah, Boké/Fria, Conakry)
• Sierra Leone: 14 confirmed cases in the country in the week to 12July in three main hotspots (Freetown, Port Loko, Kambia).  

Read complete report:

http://www.msf.org/article/ebola-crisis-update-17-july-2015

CLICK HERE - Global Health Media - The Story of Ebola - English

June 26, 2015

This animation—produced in collaboration with International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, UNICEF, and Yoni Goodman—brings to life key messages that help people see and understand how Ebola spreads and how to protect themselves and their communities.

CLICK HERE - About the film:

The story features a young girl whose grandfather dies from Ebola and puts the rest of her family at risk. The film makes visible the invisible Ebola germs to help people see and understand how Ebola spreads and how to protect themselves. Critical messages are woven through the story so that people better understand Ebola, see themselves within the context of an outbreak, and see how to act in ways that can keep themselves safe from the disease and protect their communities.

THE WASHINGTON POST by Ariana Eunjung Cha                                                      June 26, 2015

Public health officials may soon be able to screen patients for Ebola at border crossings and hospitals with a finger-prick blood test that takes mere minutes.

The development of the rapid diagnostic test, reported in The Lancet Thursday, represents a significant victory for scientists around the world who have been experimenting over the past year with all manner of vaccines, treatments and other ways of eradicating the virus.

Developing a way of confirming Ebola in a patient has been one of the top priorities. In the early stages the symptoms -- chest pain, cough, nausea -- can look like many other illnesses, making it very difficult for doctors to triage -- to determine who should be quarantined and who to send home. It can often take days or longer for laboratory tests, the current standard, to return a positive or negative result.

LANCET by Patrick G. T. Walker and others                               Volume 15, No. 7, p825–832, July 2015
The ongoing Ebola epidemic in parts of west Africa largely overwhelmed health-care systems in 2014, making adequate care for malaria impossible and threatening the gains in malaria control achieved over the past decade. We quantified this additional indirect burden of Ebola virus disease.

We estimated the number of cases and deaths from malaria in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone from Demographic and Health Surveys data for malaria prevalence and coverage of malaria interventions before the Ebola outbreak. We then removed the effect of treatment and hospital care to estimate additional cases and deaths from malaria caused by reduced health-care capacity and potential disruption of delivery of insecticide-treated bednets. We modelled the potential effect of emergency mass drug administration in affected areas on malaria cases and health-care demand....