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Tuesday, September 09, 2014

Ebola Is Rapidly Mutating As It Spreads

Fourth Ebola patient coming to U.S. hospital for treatment
The patient is expected to arrive at Emory University Hospital early Tuesday and will be treated in the same isolation unit as two other patients who were discharged after recovering from the virus, the hospital said in a statement.  

Homeland ill-prepared for pandemic, doesn't even have enough drugs to protect Secret Service
The Department of Homeland Security is unprepared to protect its own workforce should a major infectious disease hit U.S. shores, a new watchdog report is warning, raising concerns the agency may not even be able to protect its own employees in the event of a deadly flu or other pandemic disease attack. 

Rapid and durable protection against Ebola virus with new vaccine regimens
The ability of the ChAd3 Ebola virus vaccine to elicit rapid protection in monkeys is notable as the world health community battles an ongoing Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa. While the protective effects of the single shot waned over time, two out of four inoculated animals were protected when challenged with Ebola virus 10 months after vaccination.  

Ebola situation in Liberia worsens
...transmission of the Ebola virus in Liberia is already intense and the number of new cases is increasing exponentially.  

Ebola in Nigeria: Number of Ebola cases in Nigeria hits 19
The Nigerian government Monday said the country has recorded another Ebola case in southwest Lagos state, bringing the total number of Ebola cases to 19 with seven fatalities. Onyebuchi Chukwu, the country’s minister of health, told reporters in capital Abuja that 10 others have recovered after treatment, with the rest being treated, Xinhua reported.  

Obama says military will help fight Ebola outbreak in West Africa
Obama has said that the United States military will begin aiding the response to an outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa that has claimed the lives of at least 2,100 people in five countries. 

Ebola is surging in places it had been beaten back
Doctors Without Borders shuttered one of its Ebola treatment centers in Guinea in May. They thought the deadly virus was being contained there.

Sierra Leone declares Ebola lockdown
Sierra Leone - one of the countries worst hit by West Africa's Ebola outbreak - has announced a four-day lockdown to try to tackle the disease. From 18 to 21 September people will not be allowed to leave their homes, a senior official said. The aim of the move is to allow health workers to isolate new cases to prevent the disease from spreading further.

Jerusalem hospital testing Nigerian tourist for Ebola
The hospital was conducting tests to determine if the quarantined tourist was carrying the first-seen case of Ebola in Israel.  

Grim Ebola prediction: Outbreak is unstoppable for now, doc says
A doctor who just returned from treating Ebola patients in West Africa predicts the current Ebola outbreak will go on for more than a year, and will continue to spread unless a vaccine or other drugs that prevent or treat the disease are developed.

Ebola epidemic spread 'accelerating' as 1,000 deaths reported last month
The spread of the world's worst-ever Ebola epidemic has accelerated rapidly with close to 1,000 deaths in the last month alone, World Health Organisation (WHO) figures show. With the overall West Africa death toll since March reaching 1,850, the new statistics show deaths from Ebola have more than doubled in just four weeks.

16 Apocalyptic Quotes From Global Health Officials About This Horrific Ebola Epidemic
Ebola continues to spread an exponential rate. According to the World Health Organization, 40 percent of all Ebola cases have happened in just the last three weeks. At this point, the official numbers tell us that approximately 3,500 people have gotten the virus in Africa and more than 1,900 people have died. That is quite alarming, but the real problem will arise if this disease continues to spread at an exponential pace. 

World 'losing battle' to contain Ebola, says MSF
MSF told a UN briefing in New York that world leaders were failing to address the epidemic and called for an urgent global biological disaster response to get aid and personnel to west Africa. "Six months into the worst Ebola epidemic in history, the world is losing the battle to contain it. Leaders are failing to come to grips with this transnational threat," said MSF international president Joanne Liu. 

Another American medical missionary has Ebola
An American doctor working in West Africa has tested positive for the Ebola virus, a missionary group announced on Tuesday. The unidentifed doctor is the third U.S. medical missionary to contract the deadly disease in the past six weeks.

CDC Director: Ebola Outbreak ‘Is Spiraling Out Of Control’
The director for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention says that the Ebola outbreak is going to get worse. Speaking to “CBS This Morning” following his trip to the West African countries dealing with the outbreak, Dr. Tom Frieden explained that they have to act now to try to get Ebola under control.

End Times Are Near: ISIS Plans to Kill Millions in Europe and U.S. Through Bubonic Plague and Other Diseases
“Authorities in both Europe and the United States are to be extra vigilant as members of the ISIS terror group could already be Terrorism Ragingin their respective countries, preparing to unleash terrifying atrocities in the next two months at least.” ...authorities nonetheless have raised its terror threat level from “substantial” to “severe” to warn citizens that a terrorist attack is “highly likely.” 

Ebola outbreak: West Africa food harvests 'at risk'
The Ebola outbreak is putting food harvests in West Africa "at serious risk", the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warns. It has raised a special alert for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three countries worst affected. Rice and maize production will be particularly affected during the coming harvest season, says the FAO.

Ebola becoming harder to treat —US experts •It is taking toll on Nigeria’s economy
AS countries across the world battle to contain the spreads of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), the killer ailment appears to be devising means of circumventing efforts to stop it, researchers have said. Experts claim that the virus is “rapidly and continually mutating, making it harder to diagnose and treat.”  

ISIS laptop reveals project to build biological weapons
Foreign policy said that the computer belonged to a Tunisian national who studied chemistry at two separate universities in his home country before leaving to join ISIS in Syria. The Syrian rebels who captured Idlib didn't know what was on the computer or what importance it may have and therefore passed it on to Foreign Policy reporters who initially thought that the laptop was empty. 

'Hundreds' of Americans linked to IS: lawmaker
Several hundred US citizens may have had contact with Islamic State jihadists in Syria, the chairman of the powerful House Intelligence Committee said Sunday. 

WHO Predicts 20,000 Ebola Deaths
The World Health Organization (WHO) has predicted that the deaths caused by Ebola could surpass 20,000 lives if the outbreak of the virus cannot be contained. research conducted by Harvard University dicovered that the virus has moved from Guinea to Sierra Leone after 13 women became infected at the funeral of a herbalist who had been treating Ebola patients in Guinea.  

Ebola kills 5 Sierra Leone researchers before their study on outbreak is published
The work emphasized that the rapid variations could make vaccine and treatment development difficult — a point further underscored by the Ebola deaths of its authors. 

Ebola outbreak: Senegal confirms first case
Senegal's health minister has confirmed a first case of Ebola, making it the fifth West African country to be affected by the outbreak. Awa Marie Coll Seck told reporters on Friday that a young man from Guinea had travelled to Senegal despite having been infected with the virus.

Dogs Feast On Ebola Victim Carcasses in Liberia
Dogs can act as a transmitter of Ebola, but canines do no development symptoms from the virus, according to medical experts. A medical doctor told News24, “this means that dogs won’t get sick but they still could carry a potential risk through licking or biting.”  

Ebola Is Rapidly Mutating As It Spreads Across West Africa
For starters, the data show that the virus is rapidly accumulating new mutations as it spreads through people. "We've found over 250 mutations that are changing in real time as we're watching," Sabeti says. While moving through the human population in West Africa, she says, the virus has been collecting mutations about twice as quickly as it did while circulating among animals in the past decade or so. 

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