Solutions

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.

FORBES   by   David Kroll                                                                                          March 1, 2015

The widely-discussed antibody cocktail, ZMapp, is finally going to be tested under standardized, controlled conditions for its safety and efficacy in Ebola virus disease-infected patients in Liberia and, potentially, the United States.

Late Friday, the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) announced the launch of a randomized trial in up to 200 patient volunteers with confirmed Ebola virus infections.

The two-arm study will compare supportive standard of care with or without three intravenous infusions of ZMapp spaced three days apart. This is the same dosing regimen published in Nature that protected 18 of 18 monkeys when given up to five days after experimental infection.

LeafBio, the commercial arm of San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, announced concomitantly that the FDA had approved their IND for this trial. The three antibodies that comprise ZMapp target both distinct and overlapping parts of the Ebola virus glycoprotein (GP) that it uses to infect humans.

UNITED NATONS NEWS CENTRE                                                                                      Dec. 15, 2014
The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) today recommended that creditors should seriously consider debt cancellation for the countries worst-hit by the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and also projected that even if those most affected were to register zero economic growth, the impact on Africa as a continent would be minimal.

With the cost of transport and goods going up and sales going down since the Ebola outbreak, vendors in Waterside Market, Monrovia, Liberia, are making no profit to support their families. Photo: UNDP/Morgana Wingard

“Educational systems, rising social stigma, unemployment, and decreased food security are some of the big issues that Ebola-affected countries must deal with,” according to study on the Socio-Economic Impacts of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) on Africa released today by the Addis-Ababa based UN regional forum.

In other news, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) announced that nine companies have made 19 submissions of proposed diagnostic tests for Ebola.