Guinea

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES  by Kathleen Caulderwood                                        Feb. 12., 2015

The worst Ebola outbreak in history is slowing down, but the affected countries are only beginning an economic struggle that could last for years.

Just as the U.S. recalled its troops from West Africa, the World Bank pledged millions of dollars in emergency aid to avoid a food crisis that could leave millions starving.      

“Agriculture is the lifeline of the economies of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone,” Makhtar Diop, the World Bank's vice president for Africa, said in a Thursday statement.

“By speeding supplies of urgently needed seeds of major food crops to communities in West Africa, we are jump starting recovery in rural areas and preventing the looming specter of hunger in the countries hardest hit by Ebola.”

THE LANCET  by  Anna  Petherick  Volume 385, No. 9968, p591–592, 14 February 2015
The (West Africa) region has presented unforeseen challenges, and the three worst affected countries have put in place different response strategies. Anna Petherick reviews some of the lessons learned so far.

The early history of the ongoing Ebola outbreak in west Africa is a salutary statement about the lack of infectious disease surveillance capacity in one of the world's poorest regions....

Opportunities to contain the virus were lost soon after, largely because of a lack of trust between local communities and the officials and medical professionals trying to nip the epidemic in the bud.

Read complete story

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960075-7/fulltext

An ambulance transports the author to the Nebraska Medical Center in October. (Sait Serkan Gurbuz/Reuters)

THE ATLANTIC by Ashoka Mukpo                                                                          Feb. 12, 2015

Like the majority of patients taken to Western hospitals, I recovered from the disease—but health authorities are still struggling to figure out how to bring up the much-lower survival rate in West Africa.

...the 80-percent survival rate among patients who were evacuated to Western hospitals shattered the idea that an Ebola diagnosis spelled near-certain death. I know this all too well, as I’m one of those patients myself. In October, I contracted Ebola while covering the outbreak as a freelance journalist in Liberia. I was airlifted to a hospital in Nebraska, where aggressive treatment likely saved my life....
Read complete story.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/why-didnt-ebola-kill-me/385335/

CDC EID JOURNAL by  Lisa E. Hensley, Julie Dyall, Gene G. Olinger, and Peter B. Jahrlin (NIH)                     Feb. 12, 2015

The unprecedented number of Ebola virus disease (EVD) cases in western Africa has compelled the world to consider experimental and off-label therapeutics to mitigate the current outbreak. For clinicians, approved drugs are an attractive solution because of known safety profiles and availability.

Oral lamivudine (GlaxoSmithKline, Brentford, UK), a US Food and Drug Administration–approved anti-HIV drug, has been suggested as a possible antiviral agent against Ebola virus (EBOV). In September 2014, a Liberian physician, Dr. Gorbee Logan, reported positive results while treating EVD with lamivudine (1). Thirteen of 15 patients treated with lamivudine survived presumed EVD and were declared virus free. Clinical confirmation of EVD in these cases remains to be verified....