PALO ALTO WEEKLY by My Nguyen                      March 6, 2015
PALO ALTO, California -- 

...Malan and Philip Joubert, brothers from South Africa who recently moved to Palo Alto to expand their app-development company, Journey, saw the demand for mobile solutions, so they created the Ebola Care app to help aid organizations in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. 

 The app has several core functions, including contact tracing, which identifies and diagnoses people who may have come into contact with an infected person; quarantine management, which tracks and manages the 21-day quarantine period of a patient; psychological assessments to determine the well-being of health workers; social work to build case files for orphaned children; survivor surveys, which are assessments of Ebola survivors upon leaving treatment centers; verification that supplies have been distributed; and event feedback, which captures thoughts from the community after educational events.

USA TODAY  by Alison Young                                 March 6, 2015

More than 175 monkeys that were potentially exposed to a bioterror bacteria inside a major Louisiana research complex were returned to their outdoor cages before officials knew the deadly pathogen was on the loose from a lab accident.

The new admission by the Tulane National Primate Research Center, in response to repeated questions from USA TODAY, raises further questions about contamination of the environment outside of the massive research campus north of New Orleans. The bacteria, which is not found in the United States and can cause severe disease in people and animals, can live and grow in soil and water.

"Some animals were released from the vet clinic early on, but the key thing is that all the animals have been traced," said Tulane spokesman Michael Strecker. Testing of the animals is ongoing to determine if they have been exposed to the bacterium, Burkholderia pseudomallei.

Read complete story.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/03/05/at-risk-monkeys-released-from-tulane-hospital/24471615/

The Nebraska Biocontainment Unit (NBU), located at the Nebraska Medical Center, has shared its protocol for Ebola patient discharge, handling a patient's body after death and environmental disinfection in the March issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).

Discharge process for a patient treated for EVD

LOS ANGELES TIMES by  Erwin Brown                                               March 2, 2015
Dr. Matthew Waxman recently returned to Los Angeles after spending nearly two months in the town of Lunsar, Sierra Leone, where he treated Ebola patients at an isolated medical facility.

He and colleagues toiled in harsh and stressful conditions, caring for people "the best we could." In the quiet stretches between intense bursts of drama and terror, they talked about the reception that would await them at home — at times with a degree of dread, since some returning medical workers have had less than enthusiastic welcomes....