Sadly, Doctor loses Ebola Battle, Dies in Omaha

Medic-ALL (17:11:2014) Courtesy New York Times 

WASHINGTON — This time, the challenge of Ebola was much steeper for the doctors and nurses at Nebraska Medical Center, one of a handful of hospitals specially designated to handle cases of the deadly virus in the United States.

Unlike the two Ebola patients they had successfully treated earlier this year at the hospital’s biocontainment unit in Omaha, the man who arrived from Sierra Leoneon Saturday, Dr. Martin Salia, was in extremely critical condition. Dr. Salia, a legal permanent resident of the United States who had been working as a surgeon in Sierra Leone, died early Monday morning, barely into his second day of treatment, but almost two weeks into his illness.

The Late Dr Martin Saila

“Even the most modern techniques that we have at our disposal are not enough to help these patients once they reach a critical threshold,” said Dr. Jeffrey P. Gold, chancellor of the University of the Nebraska Medical Center, the hospital’s academic partner.

Dr. Philip Smith, the medical director of the biocontainment unit, said that Dr. Salia, 44, had initially been tested for Ebola in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, on Nov. 7, but that the test came back negative. He was retested there on Nov. 10, at which point the results were positive. Dr. Smith said such false negatives were not uncommon early in the illness.

Dr. Daniel W. Johnson, a critical care specialist at Nebraska Medical Center, said that Dr. Salia’s kidneys had stopped functioning and that he was laboring to breathe when he arrived at the hospital late Saturday afternoon after a 15-hour flight. Doctors quickly tried two treatments they had used on their other Ebola patients: an experimental antiviral drug and a plasma transfusion from theblood of an Ebola survivor, which researchers believe may provideantibodies against the virus.

But Dr. Salia was already so ill that within hours of his arrival at the hospital, he needed continuous dialysis to replace his kidney function. By the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, he was in respiratory failure and needed a ventilator, Dr. Johnson said on Monday. Around the same time, he added, Dr. Salia’s blood pressure plummeted.

“He progressed to the point of cardiac arrest, and we weren’t able to get him through this,” Dr. Johnson said at a news conference in Omaha. “We really, really gave it everything we could.”

Dr. Smith said he did not know how Dr. Salia had contracted the virus. “He worked in an area where there was a lot of Ebola disease, much of it probably unrecognized,” Dr. Smith said, “and there were many opportunities for him to have contracted it.”

In the frenetic neighborhood of Kissy, on the eastern end of Freetown, an eerie quiet hung over the United Methodist Hospital on Monday as news spread that Dr. Salia had died. He was the chief medical officer and the only surgeon at United Methodist Kissy Hospital, according to United Methodist News Service.

Leonard Gbloh, the administrator of the hospital, said he did not think Dr. Salia could have contracted Ebola there.

“We have not been taking Ebola patients here” he said. “And we had stringent control measures in place to prevent it entering.”

The hospital even stopped all surgical work several months ago as a precaution, Mr. Gbloh said. Now, the hospital is being decontaminated and several staff members who came into contact with Dr. Salia after he fell ill are in quarantine there.

Ebola: Sierra Leone Quarantines A Million People

The Guardian (25:09:2014)

Sierra Leone’s government has quarantined more than a million people in an attempt to bring an end to the spread of the deadlyEbola virus.

Areas in the east of the country on the border of Guinea have been under quarantine for months but travel is now restricted in three more areas where an estimated 1.5 million people live. Nearly a third of the country’s population across 14 districts is now under curfew.

The move comes as world leaders meet to discuss the crisis at the United Nations, and days after a three-day nationwide lockdown ended.

Healthworker being disinfectted after helping out with a suspected case of Ebola on Freetown, Sierra Leone

In an address to the nation, Sierra Leone’s president, Ernest Bai Koroma, said the weekend’s lockdown had “met its objectives” but had also exposed the challenges posed by the Ebola crisis.

In addition to announcing the new isolation districts, the government is establishing corridors for travel between non-quarantined districts, with a curfew on all travel outside the hours of 9am and 5pm. Koroma said the isolation would “definitely pose great difficulties for our people in these districts”.

The British charity Street Child said there had been no warning given of the latest lockdown and said it was concerned that this would lead to mass starvation. “We were not prepare for the quarantine overnight. The areas being quarantined are really poor communities, most people live on 50p a day,” its country director, Kelfa Kargbo, told the Guardian.

“We need more help from the World Food Programme, but more than that we need a distribution network to be built to make sure the food gets in and gets in regularly to the starving people. I am expecting starvation to show in three or four weeks unless this is addressed.”

The northern districts of Port Loko and Bombali have been closed off indefinitely along with the southern district of Moyamba, effectively sealing in around 1.2 million people.

The deadliest Ebola epidemic on record has infected more than 6,200 people in westAfrica and killed nearly half of them, according to the World Health Organisation’s latest figures.

The virus is spread through bodily fluids and once symptomatic can kill within four or five days. Symptoms include rampant fever, severe muscle pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and, in some cases, internal and external bleeding through the eyes and mouth.

World leaders are due to attend a meeting on Ebola convened by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, in New York later on Thursday, with Koroma and Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf connected by video link.

The meeting, part of the UN general assembly, will hear from Barack Obama, and world leaders are expected to pledge help for attempts to contain the spread of the virus.

Obama, who is sending 3,000 troops to west Africa to help health workers, urged other countries to get behind a broader international effort.

In a speech to the general assembly, Obama grouped Ebola with the crisis in Ukraine and the threat posed by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as new dangers to global security.

“As we speak, America is deploying our doctors and scientists – supported by our military – to help contain the outbreak of Ebola and pursue new treatments,” Obama told the assembly. “But we need a broader effort to stop a disease that could kill hundreds of thousands, inflict horrific suffering, destabilise economies and move rapidly across borders.”

Door-to-door searches during the three-day curfew in Sierra Leone identified more than 350 suspected new cases of Ebola, according by the top US diplomat in the country. Charge d’affairs Kathleen Fitzgibbon said teams of volunteers had also discovered 265 corpses, of which 216 had since been buried.

In an email to emergency workers, she said one of the priorities was to ensure all bodies were buried correctly, as funerals have been identified as one of the ways the disease has spread, with relatives touching the bodies of the deceased.

The US Centres for Disease Control estimated that the number of cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone could rise to 1.4 million by January, in a worst-case scenario based on data obtained before the world ramped up its response.

Ebola Fight: Sierra Leone Begins 3-Day Lockdown

Medic-ALL (19:09:2014)

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — One of the most stringent anti-Ebola measures to date began in Sierra Leone this morning as the country's government imposed a three-day national lockdown, ordering people off the streets and into their homes in an effort to stamp out the deadly disease.

Police officers patrolled the streets of the densely populated capital, telling stragglers to go home and stay indoors. Volunteers in bright jerseys prepared to go house-to-house throughout the country to warn people about Ebola’s dangers and to root out those who might be infected but were staying in hiding.

The normally busy streets of Freetown were empty Friday morning, stores were closed and pedestrians were rare on the main thoroughfares.

The country’s president, justifying the extraordinary move in a radio address Thursday night, suggested that Sierra Leone was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the disease.

Some of the things we are asking you to do are difficult, but life is better than these difficulties,” President Ernest Bai Koroma said.

More than 200 new cases of Ebola have been reported in Sierra Leone in the past week, according to the World Health Organization, with transmission described as particularly high in the capital; nearly 40 percent of cases in the country were identified in the three weeks preceding Sept. 14; and more than 560 people have died in Sierra Leone, about one-fifth of the total from this outbreak.

The campaign that began here Friday morning reflected the desperation of West African governments — and in particular those of the three hardest-hit countries, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — as they struggle with an epidemic that the health authorities have warned is showing no signs of slowing down.

No country has attempted anything on the scale of what is being tried in Sierra Leone, where more than 20,000 volunteers enlisted to help identify households where the authorities suspect people infected with the Ebola virus are hiding.

Culled: New York Times

Ebola Outbreak: Vastly Underestimated

WHO (15:08:2014)
Though more than 1,000 people have died in the world's worst ever outbreak, the UN now says that number may be higher.

Staff with the World Health Organisation battling an Ebola outbreak in West Africa see evidence the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimates the scale of the outbreak, the UN agency has said on its website.

The death toll from the world's worst outbreak of Ebola stood on Wednesday at 1,069 from 1,975 confirmed, probable and suspected cases, the agency said. The majority were in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, while four people have died in Nigeria.

The agency's apparent acknowledgement the situation is worse than previously thought could spur governments and aid organisations to take stronger measures against the virus.

"Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak," the organisation said.

"WHO is coordinating a massive scaling up of the international response, marshalling support from individual countries, disease control agencies, agencies within the United Nations system, and others."

International agencies are looking into emergency food drops and truck convoys to reach hungry people in Liberia and Sierra Leone cordoned off from the outside world to halt the spread of the virus, a top World Bank official said.

In the latest sign of action by West African governments, Guinea has declared a public health emergency and is sending health workers to all affected border points, an official said.

An estimated 377 people have died in Guinea since the outbreak began in March in remote parts of a border region near Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Guinea says its outbreak is under control with the numbers of new cases falling, but the measures are needed to prevent new infections from neighbouring countries.

"Trucks full of health materials and carrying health personnel are going to all the border points with Liberia and Sierra Leone," Aboubacar Sidiki Diakit president of Guinea's Ebola commission, said late on Wednesday.

As many as 3,000 people are waiting at 17 border points for a green light to enter the country, he said.

"Any people who are sick will be immediately isolated. People will be followed up on. We can't take the risk of letting everyone through without checks."

Experimental drugs

Sierra Leone has declared Ebola a national emergency as has Liberia, which is hoping that two of its doctors diagnosed with Ebola can start treatment with some of the limited supply of experimental drug ZMapp.

Canada's Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp is also exploring making more of its experimental Ebola treatment, Chief Executive Officer Mark Murray said.

Nigeria also has declared a national emergency, although it has so far escaped the levels of infection seen in the three other countries.

Ebola is one of the world's most deadly diseases and kills the majority of those infected. Its symptoms include internal and external bleeding, diarrhoea and vomiting.

The US State Department ordered family members at its embassy in Freetown to depart Sierra Leone because of limitations on regular medical care as a result of the outbreak.

Source: World Health Organization(WHO)                  AlJazeera

Medic-ALL.Inc 2014

Ebola WATCH:.WHAT'S NEW!!!

SATURDAY 02:08:2014

US Ebola victim arrives at Emory University hospital in Atlanta:

One of two two US victims of the West African Ebola outbreak, Dr. Kent Brantly arrived in the country on Saturday and was transferred to an Atlanta hospital with one of the most sophisticated isolation units in the country.

He was flown by specially adapted private jet to Dobbins Air Force Base in Marietta, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. He was said to have contracted the disease while working for a charity in Liberia.

The other victim is to be carried on a latter flight as the plane is equipped to carry one patient at a time.

State of Emergency in Sierra Leone:

A state of emergency has been declared in Sierra Leone and troops have been called in to enforce an Ebola quarantine, joining Liberia in imposing controls to curb the worst ever outbreak of the virus amid fears it could spread beyond West Africa.

Nigeria's 1479 Land Borders raises fears

There are fears that Nigeria's 1479 porous borders poses a threat to the ability of the country to check the spread of the deadly Ebola virus. There are calls being made to ensure the closing of some of the borders by the Federal Government.

A disease out of control?

Doctors beyond borders fear that the deadly Ebola virus disease may be out of control.

Ref : the guardian (U.S)

         Punch (Ngr)

Medic-ALL.Inc

BREAKING:Sierra Leone's Top Ebola Doctor dies after contracting virus

Dailymail; U.K (29/07/14):

Sierra Leone's top doctor fighting an outbreak of Ebola has died from the virus, the country's chief medical officer, Brima Kargbo, said on Tuesday.

 Sheik Umar Khan, who was credited with 

treating more than 100 patients, was infected with Ebola this month and had been moved to a treatment ward run by medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres in the far north of the country.

The news of his death comes as health officials admit they do not have a list of all the people a Liberian Ebola victim came into contact with in the hours before he collapsed, prompting fears the outbreak could spread.