Situation Report

PLOS MEDICINE by Mark J. Siedner, Lawrence O. Gostin, Hilarie H. Cranmer,and John D. Kraemer                        March 24, 2015

In-depth paper on lessons learned from the West Africa Ebola outbreak

NEW YORK TIMES  by Sheri Fink                                                            March  25, 2015

Worries have widened in recent days over the number of people in Liberia who may have been exposed to the country’s first Ebola case in more than two weeks, a street vendor who lived in a one-bathroom house shared with 52 others in a Monrovia suburb and who had sold food at a school where more than 1,900 students are enrolled.

A new study shows the durability of a novel 'disseminating' cytomegalovirus (CMV)-based Ebola virus (Zaire ebolavirus; EBOV) vaccine strategy that may eventually have the potential to reduce ebolavirus infection in wild African ape species.

These are western lowland gorillas, one of the great ape species threatened by Ebola. Credit: Copyright 2012 Chris Whittier

A cytomegalovirus (CMV)-based vaccine provides long-lasting protective immunity against Ebola virus, and has potential for development as a disseminating vaccine strategy to prevent ebolavirus infection of wild African ape populations.

The multi-institutional study is led by Dr Michael Jarvis at Plymouth University, and is published today, 25th March 2015, in Vaccine.

INFECTION CONTROL TODAY                                      March 24, 2015
The World Health Organization (WHO) is publishing a series, "Ebola Diaries," with first-person accounts of WHO staff and others deployed to the field for Ebola response since the first cases were reported in West Africa on March 23, 2014.
 
Dr. Stéphane Hugonnet, team lead for gobal capacities, alert and responses for the World Health Organization (WHO), was one of the first WHO experts sent to Guinea to investigate cases of Ebola reported in late March 2014. A medical doctor who has spent the past 20 years working for WHO, MSF and others, managing outbreaks ranging from cholera, measles and yellow fever, to Lassa, Ebola and meningitis, Hugonnet found a very different sort of outbreak when he arrived in Guinea.

"We were following this rumor of a small cluster of unexplained deaths in Guinea," he says. "Some thought it could be Lassa    phane fever, but the transmission pattern was very compatible with Ebola. When the lab results came back, we learned that there was Ebola Zaire in West Africa.