Situation Report

WASHINGTON POST  by Rachel Feltman     Dec. 14, 2014 

According to research published Tuesday by the Robert Koch-Institute, fruit bats are almost certainly to blame for the current Ebola outbreak, which has claimed 7,800 lives so far. But while most outbreaks caused by a fruit bat would have someone who hunted or handled the mammal for meat to blame for the contagion, the researchers believe that this case of bat-to-human transmission was sparked by children at play.

A child under observation for signs of Ebola. (Michel du Cille/The Washington Post)

Ebola is a zoonotic disease -- one that's spread between species. The first human cases of Ebola can indeed be traced roughly to the hunting, selling, and eating of bushmeat, or wild mammals like bats and non-human primates...

But the first case of 2014's outbreak has been traced to someone who shouldn't have had much contact with bushmeat. In October, researchers reported that patient zero of the outbreak was likely a 2-year-old boy named Emile Ouamouno who lived in the Guinea village of Meliandou.

Health Body to Consider Rapid-Response Teams, Other Changes

WALL STREET JOURNAL by Betsy McKay in Atlanta and Peter Wonacott in Freetown, Sierra Leone             Dec. 30, 2014

The tepid initial response to West Africa’s Ebola outbreak exposed holes in the global health system so gaping it has prompted the World Health Organization to consider steps to prevent a repeat, including emergency-response teams and a fund for public-health crises.

In a special session next month in Geneva, the WHO’s executive board is expected to consider those and other recommendations by its member countries—including a proposal that it commission an outside review of its Ebola response—according to a document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The plan comes as global health officials are struggling with a knotty question: how the WHO could have moved at a slow pace initially despite lessons learned more than a decade ago from another deadly outbreak, of SARS.

Read complete story.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/after-slow-ebola-response-who-seeks-to-avoid-repeat-1419892712

UPDATE: Ebola Patient Is Moved to London, and 2 Others Are Tested in Britain

NEW YORK TIMES     by Alan Cowell                                                 Dec. 30, 2014

LONDON — A health worker who returned from West Africa and was found to have Ebola when she arrived home in Scotland was transferred on Tuesday to Britain’s designated treatment center for the disease in London. The authorities also reported that two more people were being tested for the virus.

WASHINGTON POST by  Rachel Feltman                      Dec. 29, 2014

Pharmaceutical company Roche announced Monday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had provided an Emergency Use Authorization -- a sort of pre-approval for use in particularly bad outbreaks -- for a new kind of Ebola test.

This isn't the first test to get this kind of approval during the 2014 outbreak of the Zaire strain of Ebola, which has killed more than 7,500 people to date and is still an ongoing crisis in parts of West Africa.... 

So it's no surprise that Swiss company Roche has put its version of a rapid test forward. The LightMix Ebola Zaire rRT-PCR Test works in about three hours, and is designed for Roche's testing consoles.