NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO by Jason Beaubein                                              May 9, 2015

MONROVIA -They were the ones who went door to door to stop the spread of Ebola. They were accused of passing on the virus and had water hurled at them. They were the community health workers — the unsung heroes of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia.

NEW YORK TIMES  by Normitsu Onishia                                                             May 9, 2015          

...“I am thrilled by the significant progress made by the people of Liberia,” said Tolbert Nyenswah, a deputy health minister. But, he warned, “we still need to keep up vigilance.”

The weak health systems in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three nations hit hardest by the disease, did more than just crumple in the face of Ebola’s onslaught last year. They played a central role in spreading the disease.

Clinics routinely misdiagnosed the disease and discharged Ebola patients with pills for common illnesses. Infected health care workers passed the virus to their colleagues, families and communities.

Local and international health officials are now focusing on extinguishing the waning Ebola epidemic in Guinea and Sierra Leone. But they have a bigger goal as well: shoring up beleaguered health systems that were inadequate long before Ebola struck.

iberia is the first of the three main countries affected by Ebola to be free of the disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today (9 May), marking the end of the 15-month-long epidemic in the country. But the epidemic continues in nearby Sierra Leone and Guinea, and the WHO is warning against complacency, highlighting the risk of further flare ups and geographical spread.

msh.org - globalhealth.org                        (CLICK HERE - EVENT RSVP)

This panel discussion will focus on how key local stakeholders are working to build systems capable of addressing long-term global health issues like NCDs while maintaining resilience to outbreaks like Ebola. In light of the need to develop domestic financing mechanisms to pay for long term health solutions, stakeholders are moving beyond public-private partnerships to a model of country stakeholder engagement that includes and leverages the strengths of all actors. 

Speakers:

MEDICAL NEWS by Sally Robertson                                                 May 8, 2015

Unprecedented in both its impact and scale, the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa has led to a renewed interest in the issue of global health security. How is global health security defined? What qualifies as a global health concern? What are the implications for governmental policies and programmes?

To address some of these questions, The Lancet invited a number of respected global health practitioners to reflect on the wider lessons that can be learned from the crisis and make suggestions about steps that can be taken to counteract such threats in the future.

Through a series of essays, the review discusses whether the outbreak is likely to improve the governance of global health security and reflects on the relevance of several issues, from the use of counterfeit medicines through to the importance of securing people’s access to healthcare.

Read complete story.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20150508/Will-the-Ebola-crisis-lead-to-improved-global-health-security.aspx

THE LANCET

ASSOCIATED PRESS by MARILYNN MARCHIONE AP Chief Medical Writer                                      May 7. 2015

(Scroll down for full study and American Academy of Ophtalolgy statement.)

For the first time, Ebola has been discovered inside the eyes of a patient months after the virus was gone from his blood.

Ebola has infected more than 26,000 people since December 2013 in West Africa. Some survivors have reported eye problems but how often they occur isn't known. The virus also is thought to be able to persist in semen for several months.

The new report concerns Dr. Ian Crozier, a 43-year-old American physician diagnosed with Ebola in September while working with the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone.

He was treated at Emory University Hospital's special Ebola unit in Atlanta and released in October when Ebola was no longer detected in his blood. Two months later, he developed an inflammation and very high blood pressure in one eye, which causes swelling and potentially serious vision problems.

Read complete story.

PR NEWSWIRE                                                                                                  May 7, 2015

(Scroll down for interview with Bill Gates)

At its Global Partners Forum, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will announce the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance Network (CHAMPS), a network of disease surveillance sites in developing countries. These sites will help gather better data, faster, about how, where and why children are getting sick and dying. This data will help the global health community get the right interventions to the right children in the right place to save lives. The network will also be invaluable in providing capacity and training in the event of an epidemic, such as Ebola or SARS. The Gates Foundation plans an initial commitment of up to $75 million on the effort.

NEW SCIENTIST  Opinion                                   May 6, 2015

...HOW the world has changed. In 1948, the first commercial jet airliner was still a few years away from take-off, and the global population was just over 2 billion. Less than one-third lived in cities. Back then, safeguarding global health seemed an eminently manageable project. The newly formed United Nations agreed, and established the World Health Organization.

 Now, over half the planet's 7 billion people are packed into urban areas. Between us, we travel tens of billions of kilometres around the globe every year, with plenty of pathogens and parasites coming along for the ride. The WHO, largely unchanged since its creation, is ill-equipped to deal with the disease threats that this new world creates.

The recent Ebola outbreak is a case in point. Even the WHO's director-general, Margaret Chan, said her organisation was "overwhelmed" and admitted that a crisis on that scale "cannot be solved by a single agency".

ALL AFRICA  THE NEW REPUBLIC Liberia by Reuben Sei Waylaun May 6, 2015
MONROVIA -- A study conducted by the Social Mobilization and Behavior Change Communication at the Ministry of Health in collaboration with UNICEF has shown that radio played significant roles in the fight against the deadly Ebola virus in the country.

The head of the Social Mobilization and Behavior Change Communication, Rev. John Sumo said radio played a critical role in the awareness figuring to 93% out of the study conducted on 1100 households in the five worst hit counties in December 2014.

He said, "during the study, 93% of the respondents said they first learnt about Ebola from the radio. They acknowledged that radio messages were complimented in collaboration with information from their closest neighbors and the print media...."

Read complete story.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201505060574.html

LIVESCIENCE  by Rachel Rettner                                                          May 6, 2015

The Ebola virus can live on surfaces in hospitals for nearly two weeks, a new study suggests.

Researchers tested how long the Ebola virus could survive on plastic, stainless steel and Tyvek, a material used in Ebola suits. The researchers also simulated different environmental conditions, including a climate-controlled hospital at 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius) and 40 percent humidity, and the typical environment of West Africa, at 80 F (27 C) and 80 percent humidity.

In general, the virus survived on surfaces for a longer time when in the climate-controlled conditions than in the West African environment, the study found. Under hospital-like conditions, the virus lived for 11 days on Tyvek, eight days on plastic and four days on stainless steel. The longest the virus was able to survive in the tropical conditions of the West African environment was three days, on Tyvek.

Read complete story.

http://www.livescience.com/50758-ebola-virus-survival-surfaces.html

AFP                                                                                        May 6, 2015

Geneva -- The number of deaths from the Ebola epidemic now exceeds 11,000, figures from the World Health Organization showed on Wednesday.

In the three countries worst affected -- Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea -- 26,593 people were infected, and 11,005 had died, the WHO said.

Only nine new cases were recorded in each country last week, the lowest figures for almost a year.

Read complete story.

http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-deaths-pass-11-000-mark-223707192.html

See WHO Ebola situation report 6 May, 2015

http://apps.who.int/ebola/en/current-situation/ebola-situation-report-6-may-2015

Now the threat from Ebola seems to be receding, rich countries must not revert to their former myopia. Listening to other countries’ needs and investing in women and children would be a start

THE GUARDIAN Commentary  by Chelsea Clinton and Devi Sridar                May 6, 2015

Amnesia has set in across the world as the fear and global attention given to Ebolarecedes. But this is not a new phenomenon. With Sars, avian flu, swine flu and Mers, there were repeated calls to fix the global health system to avoid previous mistakes. We cannot continue to be surprised when a health crisis emerges and we need to start to take a long-term, inclusive perspective to ensure health security across the world. Myopia was a key factor in the failure to respond to Ebola in a rapid and effective way.

There are three immediate steps that should be taken:

Read complete article.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/06/ebola-global-health-priorities-chelsea-clinton

UNITED NATIONS NEWS CENTRE                          May 5, 2015
Liberia is expected to be declared Ebola-free by the World Health Organization (WHO) within the week if no more new cases of the disease are discovered before then, the top United Nations official in Liberia said Tuesday  as she briefed the Security Councl.

Karin Landgren, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Liberia and Head of the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), briefs the Security Council. UN Photo/Mark Garten

“After almost 14 months spent under the cloud of Ebola, this will be joyful news for the country,” said Karin Landgren, Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Liberia. “Liberians and their Government, with support from the UN and ineternational partners, have gotten firmly ahead of the epidemic. Now, all Liberians must remain vigilant.”

SCIENCE   by Martin Enserink                                                                           May 1, 2015
...Guinea is where some of the last embers of West Africa's Ebola epidemic are smoldering. It had only 21 new Ebola cases in the past week, 16 of them in the city of Forécariah, a 3-hour drive from the capital. Guards at many official buildings still routinely point the Thermoflash, a contact less, revolver-shaped thermometer, at visitors' temples, and vats full of bleach are still omnipresent.

 But Ebola rarely makes headlines anymore, and antigovernment protests that paralyzed Conakry last week were about upcoming elections, not the virus.

Still, Guinea's Ebola czar, Sakoba Keita, notes that there have been lulls before, the last one in January, that were invariably followed by flare-ups.

...Guinea's stubborn epidemic means that it may soon be the last place where researchers can do real-world tests of Ebola treatments and vaccines.
Read complete story.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6234/485.full

CANADIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION by Moneeza Walji                                    Mayl 4, 2015
The call to action for the Ebola outbreak extended far and wide, with the epidemic now having more than 26 000 cases and claiming more than 10 000 lives, but the response has raised questions about underlying problems that hinder health care in some countries and about who was best positioned to respond.

At a recent session of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health in Boston, Dr. Peter Piot, one of the discoverers of the Ebola virus, said the outbreak and crisis in West Africa "has revealed major fault lines in the local societies and in the international system; in how we conduct research and how we develop new drugs and vaccines and also in trust and the way that international aid and development and cooperation is operating."