Solutions

Telemedicine and innovative devices could help reduce unnecessary exposures to virus

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CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORP.                                                                                 July 19, 2015

Space technology such as satellite images and telemedicine could play a bigger role in helping to control the Ebola outbreak that's killed more than 11,250 people, a Canadian doctor says.

Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield holds the Microflow experiment to test how the instrument counts blood cells in orbit. Such space spinoffs have the potential to be applied to outbreaks of infectious diseases on Earth. (NASA)

This week's issue of the medical journal Lancet Infectious Disease includes a commentary titled "Help from Above — outer space and the fight against Ebola."

ebolaresponse.un.org/recovery-conference

The road towards recovery

Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have undertaken a remarkable effort to defeat the devastating Ebola outbreak. Thanks to those efforts and the support of the international community, the affected countries have seen a significant decline in the number of new cases. Recovery must now be pursued as part of the goal of “getting to zero and staying at zero,” as the response changes from emergency operations to multi-faceted, long-term support.

To this end, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is hosting an International Ebola Recovery Conference in New York to ensure that recovery efforts go beyond redressing direct development losses to build back better and ensure greater resilience.

The Conference will be held in cooperation with the Governments of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in partnership with the African Union, the African Development Bank, the European Union and the World Bank.

Aims of the Conference

submitted by George Hurlburt

A group of volunteer medical workers carry the bodies of Ebola victims to a car in order to bury them in Kptema graveyard in Kenema, Sierra Leone, on August 24, 2014. Mohammed Elshamy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

wired.com - by Erica Check Hayden - June 30, 2015

. . . The patients held the answer. If they survived, they carried antibodies that targeted the very viruses that had almost killed them. The samples he’d been working with didn’t contain antibodies, but if he could get blood from survivors, he might be able to figure out how to make the same antibodies that their immune systems had produced. It would not be easy or fast, but he couldn’t stand by while more people lost their lives—if not in this outbreak, then in the next one, or the next one after that. It was time for a new plan. . . .

. . . Once your body knows how to make antibodies specific to a disease, it never forgets . . . So physicians use survivor serum in the hope that amid the trillions of antibodies an adult human can make, the ones that fight a specific disease will be in the mix. It’s not a new idea.

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