Sierra Leone

NBC NEWS by Maggie Fox                                                                             Feb. 19, 2015

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is helping prepare for a new Ebola vaccine trial in Sierra Leone, the country that's now the worst hit by the Ebola epidemic.

The CDC will work with Sierra Leonean authorities to vaccinate up to 6,000 health care workers, including doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers, against a virus that's infected more than 11,000 people in Sierra Leone alone, killing 3,400 of them.

This trial will test just one of the Ebola vaccines in development - one designed by U.S. and Canadian government researchers with a company called New Link Genetics and licensed to Merck. It uses an animal virus called vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) to carry tiny pieces of the Ebola virus to help train the immune system to recognize it.

Read complete story.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/cdc-ready-vaccinate-6-000-against-ebola-sierra-leone-n308576

DEVEX   by Molly Anders                                                                                         Feb. 19, 2015

...While the Ebola crisis is far from over, officials in government and the international development community have begun to think more the medium and long term. What can they learn from past post-crisis recovery initiatives?

  Health worker Alivin Davis poses next to the a board featuring handprints of Ebola survivors in Liberia. Photo by: Neil Brandvold / USAID / CC BY-NC

Devex asked aid officials and government officials from the region how to avoid some of the most common pitfalls that can plague — haunt, even — recovery and reconstruction efforts. Here are three of them.

1. Quality over quantity.

....By not paying closer attention to the economic effects of foreign aid on the local market, humanitarian groups hurt livelihoods and slowed reconstruction in the country.

2. Prioritize local ownership....

ASSOCIATED PRESS  by EDITH M. LEDERER                     Feb. 18, 2015

UNITED NATIONS -- The goal set by the presidents of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea of reducing the number of new cases of the deadly disease to zero by April 15 can be reached — but only if local communities stop unsafe burials and healing practices that involve human contact, the U.N. Ebola chief said Wednesday.

Dr. David Nabarro told the U.N. General Assembly that there are now 10 times fewer people diagnosed with Ebola each week than there were last September. But he said preventing the final 10 percent of infections — about 120 to 130 new cases per week — is probably going to be the hardest because it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Ismael Ould Cheikh Ahmed, who heads the the U.N. Ebola mission in West Africa SAID ...."denial, distrust and a lack of understanding (of Ebola) continue to create resistance in certain pockets and lead to dangerous practices that probably promote further outbreaks."

submitted by Stephen Morse

elifesciences.org - September 8, 2014 - eLife 2014;3:e04395
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.04395

Ebola virus disease (EVD) is a complex zoonosis that is highly virulent in humans. The largest recorded outbreak of EVD is ongoing in West Africa, outside of its previously reported and predicted niche. We assembled location data on all recorded zoonotic transmission to humans and Ebola virus infection in bats and primates (1976–2014). Using species distribution models, these occurrence data were paired with environmental covariates to predict a zoonotic transmission niche covering 22 countries across Central and West Africa. Vegetation, elevation, temperature, evapotranspiration, and suspected reservoir bat distributions define this relationship. At-risk areas are inhabited by 22 million people; however, the rarity of human outbreaks emphasises the very low probability of transmission to humans. Increasing population sizes and international connectivity by air since the first detection of EVD in 1976 suggest that the dynamics of human-to-human secondary transmission in contemporary outbreaks will be very different to those of the past.