Solutions

Op-ed

NEW YORK TIMES by Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group      Dec. 11, 2014                                              

MONROVIA, Liberia — In my career as a medical doctor and global health policy maker, I have been in the middle of monumental struggles, including fights to make treatment accessible in the developing world for those living with H.I.V./AIDS as well as multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. But the Ebola epidemic is the worst I’ve ever seen...

Members of District 13 ambulance service disinfect a room in a village north of Monrovia, Liberia. Credit Jerome Delay/Associated Press

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS                                                                                  Dec, 10, 2014

In an editorial published online today in the International Journal of Epidemiology, experts from the Departments of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at Columbia University, New York, are calling for survivors of the Ebola epidemic to be mobilised in a bid to hasten containment of the disease.

We already know that the current Ebola outbreak is unique in its magnitude and for its dispersion in dense, mobile populations. Physicians and nurses face high mortality, and foreign aid in the form of medical supplies and staff continues to be unequal to the scope of the problem. With a case recovery rate of around 30% at the present time in West Africa, survivors already number in the thousands.

THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL by Kelly Grant                Dec.7, 2014

When the World Health Organization declared Nigeria officially Ebola-free in October, most of the fanfare centred on how Africa’s most populous country had managed to keep the virus from spreading.

But there was another, less heralded aspect of Nigeria’s success story that a Canadian doctor and her colleagues wanted to explore in more depth: How had 12 of Nigeria’s 20 Ebola patients beaten the virus?

The hospitals in Nigeria weren’t maybe to the standards of a Western hospital in terms of equipment, but the staff were phenomenal. They managed to get a very high survival rate,” said Eilish Cleary, a New Brunswick chief medical officer of health who travelled to Nigeria to provide epidemiological support to the World Health Organization during the outbreak. “Case fatality rate for Ebola can be up to 70 to 90 per cent. In Nigeria, it was 40 per cent.”

Dr. Cleary conducted detailed, videotaped interviews with six of the Nigerian patients to learn more about their treatment and recovery. The key to their survival seemed to be guzzling a stunning amount of water with oral rehydration solution [ORS] to fend off the cascade of internal failures typically caused by the virus.

UNITED NATIONS NEWS CENTRE                                                                             Dec. 4, 2014
Four hundred motorbikes equipped with cooler boxes will help speed up deliveries of blood samples to laboratories from remote areas of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and reduce the waiting time for Ebola test results, thanks to a donation today from Germany to the United Nations.

Four hundred cooler box-equipped motorbikes for the Ebola Response were officially handed over to the UN Humanitarian Response Depot by German Ambassador to Ghana Ruediger John, and will be used to bring blood samples to labs in the most affected areas of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. UNMEER Photo/Martine Perret

At UN Headquarters, meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters that the immediate priorities of the United Nations are to stop the virus and to treat all the people who have Ebola. “We have to ensure that all essential services are provided, and also we have to help them preserve their social and political stability, and keeping a further outbreak from happening.”