ALLIANCE NEWS                                                  Nov. 10, 21014

Hamburg - Researchers at the Hamburg University Clinic (UKE) have begun the first tests on humans in Germany of an Ebola vaccine. The vaccine delivered by the World Health Organisation (WHO) is initially to be tested on 30 volunteers over the next six months, the clinic said Monday, noting that tests on animals had been successful.

If all the testing phases in Hamburg go successfully, then it is hoped that the vaccine can start to be employed by the fall of 2015, a UKE spokeswoman said.

It is hoped that the vaccine "rVSV-ZEBOV," (developed in Canada) can provide protection after just a single dose. Additionally, it might prove to be effective if applied immediately after an Ebola infection starts.

Parallel to the UKE research, scientists from the University Clinic of Tuebingen are to start testing the vaccine on volunteers in Gabon. Other studies are underway in the US and are soon to get started up in Switzerland, Hamburg doctors said.

http://www.lse.co.uk/AllNews.asp?code=vdoolxoa&headline=First_Test_Of_Ebola_Vaccine_On_Humans_In_Germany_Gets_Underway

NEW YORK TIMES                                          Nov. 10, 2014
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. and KATARINA HÖIJE

Mali is about to release from the 21-day quarantine period all 108 persons who had contact with a two year old girl who died of Ebola shortly after her grandmother brought her by bus from neighboring Guinea.

A worker disinfected a bus that arrived in Kayes from Bamako — the same route taken by Fanta Condé and her family from Guinea. They rode with Africa Star, another transport company that no longer takes this precaution. Credit Nick Loomis for The New York Times

UPDATE 

New York doctor cleared of Ebola, which means there are no known Ebola cases in the U.S.

WASHINGTON POST                                                                     Nov. 10, 2014

By Mark Herman

The doctor who contracted Ebola in West Africa before returning to New York City has been declared free of the virus, hospital officials announced Monday. This news means that 41 days after the first Ebola diagnosis in the United States, there are no known cases of the virus in the country.

Craig Spencer, 33, who had been treating Ebola patients in Guinea, was diagnosed with Ebola on Oct. 23. Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City, where Spencer was being treated, confirmed in a statement Monday that he “has been declared free of the virus.” Spencer will be discharged on Tuesday, according to the hospital.

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cbsnews.com - November 9, 2014 - Lara Logan travels to Liberia to report on Americans working on the frontline of the Ebola outbreak

The following is a script of "The Ebola Hot Zone" which aired on Nov. 9, 2014. Lara Logan is the correspondent. Max McClellan, Massimo Mariano and Richard Butler, producers.

No country has been harder hit by Ebola than Liberia, a hot zone for the outbreak, where more people have died from the virus than anywhere else.

That's where most of the U.S. effort is focused, with more than 2,000 Americans now leading the international response and more on the way -- soldiers, doctors, nurses and relief workers -- who're running mobile labs, building hospitals and treating patients.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

ASSOCIATED PRESS                                                                                               Nov. 10, 2014
By Wade Williams

JENEWONDE, Liberia --The community of Jenewonde has become a new hotspot for the Ebola outbreak in Liberia. With cases on the decline in the capital, officials must now turn their attention to hard-to-reach places where the disease is flaring.

In this photo, a woman reacts, rear, as Health Care workers load the body of a family member suspected of dying from Ebola, onto the back of a truck in Jene-Wonde, Liberia. A schoolteacher brought his sick daughter from Liberia’s capital to this small town of 300 people. Soon he was dead along with his entire family, all buried in the forest nearby. (AP Photo/ Wade Williams)

Jenewonde, in Grand Cape Mount County near the border with Sierra Leone, has reportedly lost about 10 percent of its population to Ebola since late September. Markets and farms nearby have been abandoned.

Ebola is also hitting the town of Gorzohn in Rivercess County, which lies on Liberia's central coast, said Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah, who heads Liberia's Ebola response.

Cases are dropping so rapidly that Liberians are talking about the disease in the past tense. They shouldn’t be.

 FOREIGN POLICY                                                                               Nov. 7, 2014

By Laurie Garrett

MONROVIA --

...The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (in September) predicted that unless the world mobilized on a scale unprecedented in the history of disease outbreaks, the countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone could by Feb. 1, 2015 have a combined 1.4 million cases, including 980,000 deaths.

Just six weeks later, the picture is so markedly different that some Liberians talk about the epidemic using the past tense. And that worries Alex Gasasira, the acting director of the WHO in Liberia, deeply.

"Over the last six weeks efforts by everybody have resulted in a scaled-up response. So now we are slightly ahead of the virus," Gasasira told

But we are nowhere where we need to be. We are still in a very dangerous situation."

Liberia:  MSN warns that gains must not be underminded. Meanwhile U.S opens the first of its 17 treatment centers.  

(Two stories, scroll down)

 DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS                                                     Nov. 10, 2014

Monrovia – While the number of new Ebola cases reported in Liberia has declined in recent weeks, the outbreak is far from over and new hotspots continue to emerge across the country, the international medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said today, warning that the international aid response must rapidly adapt to this new phase of the epidemic, or risk undermining progress made against Ebola.

Unlike in neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone, where cases are on the rise, MSF teams in Liberia are witnessing a decline in the number of Ebola patients admitted to case management centres (CMCs) for the first time since the beginning of the Ebola epidemic.... Case numbers could again rise, as they have in Guinea, where, following two significant dips in admissions to MSF facilities, patient numbers are again increasing.

THE GUARDIAN                                        Nov. 10, 2014
By Lisa O'Caroll

The number of new cases of Ebola in Sierra Leone has jumped dramatically, putting paid to any hopes that the infection rate is slowing.

Official figures released by the minister of health and sanitation show there were 111 new cases registered on Sunday, the highest daily rate since the ministry started publishing figures in August.

There were 45 new cases the day before, including 24 in the capital, Freetown. Laboratory results for patients in Freetown, which include the new British army-built Ebola hospital, showed 40 new cases on Sunday.

There was also a spike in the number of cases in Port Loko, a district north of Freetown where there is still no treatment centre and where, until recently, corpses were left lying on verandahs, in hospitals and in houses for days before collection.

The figures come days after warnings by the UN that Ebola cases in Sierra Leone are being underreported by up to 50%.

NEW ENGLAND COMPLEX SYSTEMS INSTITUTE                                                                        Oct. 27, 2014
ABSTRACT
By Kia Hall and Yaneer Bar-Yam
The number of cases of Ebola in West Africa has been growing exponentially, and projections assume that this dynamic will continue. However, recent case reports from Liberia indicate a change. The number of new confirmed cases reported by WHO has actually diminished for five weeks in a row.
The WHO report suggests that this may be due to underreporting under conditions of high levels of stress of the number of cases taking place.

Here we report that there appears to be a sound reason for the decreasing number of cases—a change in response strategy that is working. Understanding this dynamic is of critical importance for addressing the outbreak in Sierra Leone and Guinea. In particular the number of cases in Sierra Leone continues to grow exponentially.

Discussions with a WHO response coordinator in Liberia indicates that a change in strategy from individual reporting and contact tracing to community based screening for early detection and population wide behavior change happened in mid September.

HOMELAND SECURITY NEWS WIRE                            Nov. 1, 2014
By Mick Roberts

The West African outbreak of Ebola has claimed more than 4,800 lives and this number is sure to rise. There is understandably a lot of fear about Ebola, but how does it actually compare with other fast-spreading infectious diseases?
Read complete article
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20141110-fastspreading-killers-how-ebola-compares-with-other-diseases

HOMELAND SECURITY NEWS WIRE                                                                             Nov.6, 2014

The University of Toronto, Chematria, and IBM are combining forces in a quest to find new treatments for the Ebola virus.

Using a virtual research technology invented by Chematria, a startup housed at U of T’s Impact Center, the team will use software that learns and thinks like a human chemist to search for new medicines. Running on Canada’s most powerful supercomputer, the effort will simulate and analyze the effectiveness of millions of hypothetical drugs in just a matter of weeks.

“What we are attempting would have been considered science fiction, until now,” says Abraham Heifets, a U of T graduate and the chief executive officer of Chematria. “We are going to explore the possible effectiveness of millions of drugs, something that used to take decades of physical research and tens of millions of dollars, in mere days with our technology.”

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NEW YORK TIMES                                                                                Nov. 6, 2014

Medical discussion of why some children suvive Ebola and others do not

NEW YORK TIMES                                   Nov. 10, 2014
By Sheri Fink, MD

... Over and over, doctors here have been confounded by the divergent paths of patients whose cases appeared similar at first. “No matter how long we were there, we didn’t know how to predict it,” said Dr. Steve Whiteley, a California emergency physician who volunteered.

THE MODESTO BEE                                   NOV.9, 2014

BY Ken Carlson

Nurses represented by the California Nurses Association are planning a two-day strike starting Tuesday at Kaiser Permanente hospitals and clinics.

The union claims the Oakland-based health care system has ignored its concerns that the hospitals lack protocols to protect nurses against Ebola. About 18,000 nurses could participate in the labor action at Kaiser’s 66 hospitals and clinics, the union said.

No cases of Ebola have been reported in California as the epidemic continues in West Africa.

In a statement, Kaiser said the union is in contract talks on behalf of nurses working at its health facilities. The strike is scheduled from 7 a.m. Tuesday to 6:59 a.m. Thursday.

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 http://www.modbee.com/news/business/article3683584.html#storylink=cpy

http://www.modbee.com/news/business/article3683584.html

NBC NEWS                                              Nov. 9, 2014
by Maggie Fox

The new U.S. plan to spend $6 billion fighting Ebola has a hidden agenda that aid workers approve of: not only stamping out the epidemic in West Africa, but starting to build a health infrastructure that can prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

Liberian nurses escort a suspec ted patient into the JFK nursing center in Monrovia, Sept. 18, 2014. Ahamed Jallanzo/EPA file  

President Barack Obama's $6.18 billion request is an enormous amount of money — six times what the U.S. has already committed and far more even than what the World Health Organization says is needed.

Most is going for full frontal assault on Ebola — one that hasn’t really gotten off the ground yet...

But billions are also being quietly allocated to building a health care system in the countries suffering the most — a less sexy approach that could prevent another epidemic in the future. 

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