Research

CONAKRY (Reuters) - Guinea's Ebola coordination unit has traced an estimated 816 people who may have come into contact with victims of the disease or their corpses during a recent flare-up in a village in the country's southeast, a health official said on Monday.

Guinea said on Thursday that it had discovered new cases of Ebola just hours after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared neighbouring Sierra Leone's latest outbreak over. Four people have died in the flare-up in Porokpara.

"Since the start of the tracing on Saturday, we have traced 816 contacts in 107 families," Fode Tass Sylla, spokesman for the coordination unit, said on state television. "We are optimistic because everyone is motivated and cooperating."

Two years after the world's worst known outbreak of Ebola was first identified, West Africa is still experiencing small flare-ups, the most recent in Guinea.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the deadly haemorrhagic virus could resurface at any time, since it can linger in the eyes, central nervous system and bodily fluids of some survivors.

In many villages in Liberia, it has long been part of the culture for people to routinely search out the services of witch doctors or traditional healers when they are not feeling well. Patients believe they can get better and more affordable treatment, and with access to a basic health care system limited, a traditional healer is the first stop for most when sick. Traditional procedures can include magic, fasting or dieting, bathing, massage, and surgery. Some traditional healers apply blood to the patient’s skin to cure them of their illness.

A comprehensive new study of measles and pertussis outbreaks in the United States suggests that adults’ reluctance or refusal to vaccinate themselves and their children has played a key role in the resurgence of diseases that had been largely eradicated in this country.

In an analysis published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., epidemiologists scoured reports of measles and pertussis outbreaks to glean what role vaccination refusal and hesitance played. They also considered the effect of waning immunity among those who were vaccinated.