Africa

BBC    By   Mark Doyle                                                                                                        Dec. 1, 2014

Tony Banbury declined to say if targets he had set in the fight against Ebola, to be achieved by Monday, had been met.

The targets were for the proportion of people being treated and for the safe burial of highly infectious bodies.

In October, Mr Banbury told the UN Security Council that by 1 December, "70% of all those infected by the disease must be under treatment and 70% of the victims safely buried if the outbreak is to be successfully arrested".

Mr Banbury said the 70% targets were being met in "the vast majority" of areas in the three worst-affected countries - Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

"But in some areas", he said, "including here in Sierra Leone - especially in the capital Freetown and in the town of Port Loko - we are falling short. And it is in those areas where we really need to focus our assets and our capabilities".

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NEW YORK TIMES -- BY Adam Nossiter                                                                    Dec. 1, 2014                          
Description of the way that President Alpha Conde, after intially minmizing the Ebola threat, "is mustering a late-career tenacity to confront the deadly epidemic that still infects hundreds in this battered West African nation."

                            “While shaving I think of Ebola, while eating I think of Ebola,” said President Alpha Condé of Guinea. The response of nearby nations helped galvanize Mr. Condé. Credit Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/01/world/africa/ebola-now-preoccupies-once-skeptical-leader-in-guinea.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

WASHINGTON POST  By      Lena H. Sun and Brady Dennis                                              Nov. 29, 2014

U.S. officials trying to set up a network of hospitals in this country to care for Ebola patients are running into reluctance from facilities worried about steep costs, unwanted attention and the possibility of scaring away other patients.

“They’re saying, ‘Look, we might be willing to do this, but we don’t want to be called an Ebola hospital. We don’t want people to be cancelling appointments left and right,’ ” said Michael Bell, director of laboratory safety at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

The reticence, although perhaps not surprising, complicates government efforts to ensure that the country can effectively treat people with Ebola and contain possible outbreaks. Just a few facilities in the United States have special biocontainment units, which are ideal for treating Ebola, and they can handle only two or three patients at a time

ASSOCIATED PRESS  By MICHELLE FAUL and JAMEY KEATEN Nov. 27, 2014

CONAKRY, Guinea --   ...President Alpha Conde says his government must coordinate the  (expected French)  response, one that aid workers say is confusing and inefficient. Overall the responsibility for the crisis has changed hands several times, from WHO’s regional Africa office, to its headquarters and finally to the U.N. mission.

“It’s difficult for us to understand who is working for (which) WHO” - the local Africa division or the central office in Geneva, said Pascal Piguet, a logistics expert with Doctors Without Borders who leads the Ebola treatment center in the southern town of Gueckedou....

Oyewale Tomori, a professor of virology at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria who sits on WHO’s emergency committee on Ebola, said countries themselves should be coordinating the Ebola control efforts with help from agencies like the U.S. CDC and WHO. “But that’s not happening. We have a very fractured response,” Tomori added....