Belize
confirms patient with Ebola symptoms on cruise ship off its coast
October
2014 – BELIZE - Reports
tonight are that two individuals possibly infected with the Ebola
virus are in Belizean waters. Local TV station Channel 7 monitored in
Belmopan tonight, reported having credible reports that a couple from
a Texas-based cruise ship presently anchored off Belize City, is on a
ship tender, unable to return to the cruise ship, while being refused
entry to Belize City to catch an air ambulance awaiting at the
International Airport to take them to the their country of origin,
the U.S.A. The television station in its broadcast tonight said
Belize health authorities contacted tonight have so far refused to
deny or confirm the report. Later tonight in breaking news,
Channel 5 Belize is reported that it has: “Confirmed with
representatives of the Ministry of Health that they have indeed
received a report that there is at least one passenger on board the
cruise ship, Carnival Magic, showing symptoms similar to that of the
Ebola virus. According to the report made to MOH, the person
exhibiting the symptoms did not come ashore today. The ship is
reportedly carrying 3652 passengers and a total population of 4633
persons. “The Carnival Magic departed from Galveston Texas on
Sunday, October 12 arrived in Mahogany Bay, Honduras on Wednesday
October 15 and arrived in Belize this morning, Thursday October 16.
“The
ship was scheduled to leave Belize en route to Cozumel this evening
at 5pm. However, it is still anchored in Belizean waters near State
Bank Caye.” “We have also have confirmed that the Coast Guard has
been deployed to prevent anyone from leaving the ship; including the
Belizean pilot on board.” In a press conference held last weak,
Belize’s Ministry of Health stated that in the event of an outbreak
of Ebola in Belize, no patient would be allowed into the commercial
capital Belize City, where most of the Belize government cabinet
officials reside. The MOH stated that the government hospital, the
Karl Heuesner Memorial Hospital has but one Intensive Care Unit and
they would not allow this to be overrun with Ebola patients. Belize
is a a very poor country that depends to a large extent on tourism
for its foreign exchange income. Belize City is currently the main
port of call for cruise ships. –Belizean
Spain
quarantines four: The
emergency protocol for dealing with a possible case of the Ebola
virus was activated at Madrid’s Adolfo Suarez-Barajas Airport on a
day that saw four people hospitalised with possible symptoms of the
Ebola virus. The airport protocol was activated after a Nigerian
passenger on an Air France flight (AF1300) from Paris, but who had
started his journey in Lagos, complained of fever, headache,
shivering and sweating, causing the plane crew to alert Spanish
authorities, Xinhua reported. The aircraft, which was carrying 156
passengers and seven crew, was taken to a designated area at Barajas
airport, the possible Ebola suspect was then taken to the Carlos III
Hospital in Madrid, while the remaining passengers were allowed to
disembark from the plane after having their details taken and
instructed to get in contact with the hospital should they develop
signs of fever. Thursday also saw two further people taken to the
Carlos III Hospital, where nursing auxiliary Teresa Romero is being
treated for the virus. The first of these was confirmed as someone
who had been carried in the same Ambulance as Romero, after she had
originally been taken to hospital in Alcorcon Oct 6.
The
ambulance carried no special protection against the virus and after
taking Romero to hospital was not disinfected for 12 hours during
which it carried a further 7 people. The patient, who health
authorities confirm is not a medical worker, had formed part of a
group of over 50 people considered to be “low risk” of being
infected with Ebola. The third person taken to the Carlos III is a
Spanish missionary from the “San Juan de Dios” order, the same as
Manuel Garcia Viejo, who died in Madrid of the virus in September.
The missionary, who returned from Liberia Tuesday was taken to the
hospital after developing a fever. Finally a person who abandoned
Sierra Leone eight days ago has also been taken to hospital in
Tenerife as a precautionary measure after developing a fever.
Meanwhile Romero’s state continues to give ground for optimism and
Fernando Simon, the Director of the Center for Alerts and Sanitary
Emergencies, informed on Thursday that: “the level of the virus in
her body has diminished…Her immune system is being able to control
the infection.”Simon added that Romero’s internal organs were
“improving” and there were “clear signs for hope,” 17 days
after first developing symptoms of the disease. –Daijworld
Escalation
of Ebola epidemic could trigger major food crisis
October
2014 – AFRICA - The
global famine warning system is predicting a major food crisis if the
Ebola outbreak continues to grow exponentially over the coming
months, and the United Nations still hasn’t reached over 750,000
people in need of food in West Africa as prices spiral and farms are
abandoned. On the eve of World Food Day on Thursday, U.N agencies and
non-governmental organizations are scrambling to scale up efforts to
avert widespread hunger. “The world is mobilizing and we need to
reach the smallest villages in the most remote locations,” Denise
Brown, the U.N. World Food Program’s regional director for West
Africa, said in a statement Wednesday. “Indications are that things
will get worse before they improve. How much worse depends on us
all.” WFP has said it needs to reach 1.3 million people in need in
hardest-hit Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. So far, the U.N. agency
has provided food to 534,000 people, and it expects to reach between
600,000 and 700,000 this month, Bettina Luescher, WFP’s chief
spokesperson in North America, told AP. “And we are working hard to
reach and scale up to 1.3 million eventually.” WFP is providing
food to patients in Ebola treatment centers, survivors of the virus
who have been discharged, and communities which have been quarantined
or have seen widespread transmission, including the families of those
affected.
It
is also helping with logistics and is managing the U.N. Humanitarian
Air Service between the three affected countries and nearby Dakar,
Senegal and Accra, Ghana to help humanitarian workers rapidly deploy
to the field. We are assessing how families are coping as the virus
keeps spreading,” Luescher said. “We expect to have a better
understanding of the impact of the Ebola outbreak on food
availability and farming activities by the end of October.” WFP
said its first survey using mobile telephones showed that people
living in the Kailahun and Kenema districts of Sierra Leone — where
most Ebola cases have been reported — are finding it harder to feed
their families than people in other parts of the country and are
resorting to more desperate measures to cope. More than 80 percent of
people in those areas said they ate less expensive food, and 75
percent reported that they have reduced the number of daily means and
were serving smaller portions. Kanayo Nwanze, president of the U.N.
International Fund for Agricultural Development, said Monday that up
to 40 percent of farms have been abandoned in the worst-affected
areas of Sierra Leone and there are already food shortages in Senegal
and other countries in West Africa because regional trade has been
disrupted. He said preliminary reports suggest that “trade volume
in these markets is half of what it was at this time last year.”
Andrea
Tamburini, CEO of the non-governmental organization Action Against
Hunger which operates in the hardest-hit West African countries, said
in an interview Wednesday that his two main concerns are the spike in
food costs and the shortage of manpower due to restrictions on
movement. This has led to farmers abandoning their crops to seek
refuge in locations considered less exposed to the Ebola virus, he
said. –ABC
News
Ebola
epidemic spreads to the last untouched district in Sierra Leone
October
2014 – FREETOWN,
Sierra Leone – The
deadly Ebola virus has infected two people in what was the last
untouched district in Sierra Leone, the government said Thursday, a
setback in efforts to stop the spread of the disease in one of the
hardest-hit countries. The Emergency Operations Center in its report
covering Wednesday announced the two Ebola cases in the Koinadugu
district, in Sierra Leone’s far north, which had taken aggressive
measures to keep the virus out of its mountainous territory since the
outbreak early this year. “It was the only place we are counting on
where you can go and breathe a sigh of relief and to know that now in
the whole country no district is safe, is heartrending,” said John
Caulker, the executive director of the nonprofit Fambul Tok, a group
that worked on keeping Ebola out of the district. “Now we will
increase our activities in the district and take the necessary
measures to make sure the area is safe and it does not spread,” he
told The Associated Press, noting it was just in a single chiefdom so
far. Ebola is rampant in the rest of the country, with 425 new cases
just in the last week and a health care system that is struggling to
deal with the onslaught of the disease. The World Health Organization
said there have been more than 3,000 infections in Sierra Leone with
nearly 1,200 deaths.
Last
week, the Koinadugu district’s health team received word of people
dying in the village of Fakonya, some 60 miles over very rough
terrain from the town of district center of Kabala, said Abdul Sesay,
a local health official. Some 15 people had died and then two of the
six samples tested came back as positive for the virus — the deaths
had originally been attributed to witchcraft, according to Sesay. The
town has now been isolated and nearby communities have been put under
observation. Momoh Konte, a businessman born in the district and
educated in the United States who has been very active in protecting
Koinadugu, told local press Thursday that the dead and their homes
would be cremated to protect the living. Under the system put in
place by Konte and Caulker, movement in and out of the district was
through a strict pass system and protective equipment and chlorine
were brought in to stem the transmission of the disease. The deadly
Ebola virus is transmitted by bodily fluids and has hit hardest in
Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
Koinadugu
survived infection free for so long in part because it cut itself off
from infected areas, but the affected countries have been begging
their neighbors and the international community to maintain ties and
help them fight the disease, amid increased discussions of cutting
off all contact. Planes can’t fly to the affected countries because
they are afraid they will be refused landing elsewhere, said the
African Union chair Nkosazana Zuma on Thursday and airlines that
wanted to restart service couldn’t. Currently only Moroccan
airlines and Brussels Air fly to all three countries. Sierra Leone’s
Finance Minister Kaifalah Marah on Thursday warned that border
closures and cutting flights were “killing our economies,”
describing the isolation as a de facto economic embargo. Sierra Leone
had growth rates of 9 percent before the outbreak. “It’s
critically important that these countries stay connected to the rest
of the world, part of the reason for making this trip is that if you
take the proper precautions, it is safe to travel and work here,”
U.S. Agency for Development director Rajiv Shah told AP during his
trip through Sierra Leone Wednesday. International agencies and
countries are trying to boost the capacity of the countries to fight
the disease where overstretched health care systems and minimal
sanitation have allowed transmission to rage almost unchecked. –Fox
News
Ebola
epidemic may not end without developing vaccine, scientist warns
October
2014 – AFRICA - The
Ebola epidemic, which is out of control in three countries and
directly threatening 15 others, may not end until the world has a
vaccine against the disease, according to one of the scientists who
discovered the virus. Professor Peter Piot, director of the London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it would not have been
difficult to contain the outbreak if those on the ground and the UN
had acted promptly earlier this year. “Something that is easy to
control got completely out of hand,” said Piot, who was part of a
team that identified the causes of the first outbreak of Ebola in
Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1976 and helped bring
it to an end. The scale of the epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia and
Guinea means that isolation, care and tracing and monitoring
contacts, which have worked before, will not halt the spread. “It
may be that we have to wait for a vaccine to stop the epidemic,” he
said. On Thursday night, a Downing Street spokesman said a meeting of
the government’s emergency response committee, Cobra, was told the
chief medical officer still believed the risk to the UK remained low.
“There
was a discussion over the need for the international community to do
much more to support the fight against the disease in the region,”
the spokesman said. “This included greater coordination of the
international effort, an increase in the amount of spending and more
support for international workers who were, or who were considering,
working in the region. The prime minister set out that he wanted to
make progress on these issues at the European council next week.”
Dr Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in
evidence to Congress, said he was confident the outbreak would be
checked in the US, but stressed the need to halt the raging west
African epidemic. “There are no shortcuts in the control of Ebola
and it is not easy to control it. To protect the United States we
need to stop it at its source,” he said. “One of the things I
fear about Ebola is that it could spread more widely in Africa. If
this were to happen it could become a threat to our health system and
the healthcare we give for a long time to come.” There are three
vaccines now being fast-tracked through early safety trials in
volunteers in the UK, the US and in unaffected Mali to ensure that
they do no harm.
The
results should be available by the end of November or start of
December. If they are acceptable, it is likely that healthcare
workers – who are at highest risk of being infected and over 200 of
whom have died – will be offered a vaccination before Christmas.
But the only proof that any of them works will be if there is a
significant drop in the number of deaths among vaccinated people on
the front line. “If the epidemic is not going to be stopped in
these three countries, it will definitely spread to adjacent
countries such as Ivory Coast, Guinea Bissau and Mali,” said Piot.
He was speaking at a seminar in Oxford as the World Health
Organization (WHO) warned that 15 countries, neighboring or trading
with those where the epidemic is raging, were at risk. They are Ivory
Coast, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Senegal, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon,
Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia,
Ghana, Mauritania, Nigeria, South Sudan and Togo. Nigeria and Senegal
have both succeeded in halting an outbreak. Nonetheless, Dr Isabelle
Nuttall of the WHO said all needed to be better prepared. “The
objective is to stop the transmission from occurring in these
countries. They may have a case but after one case we don’t want
more cases,” she said at a briefing. –Guardian
Has
Marburg or Ebola made it to Kenya? Suspect case of woman who died of
hemorrhagic fever awaits test
October
2014 – KENYA – Bungoma
is a town in Bungoma County of Kenya, bordered by Uganda in the west.
Bungoma town was established as a trading centre in the early 20th
century. The town is the headquarters of Kenya’s Bungoma County and
it hosts a municipal council. As the Ebola virus continues to shake
the world, residents at the Kenya Unganda border in Busia have
expressed concerns about the measures in place to screen those
crossing into Kenya from neighboring countries. This coming just hour
after the Marburg scare in Bungoma after a woman died of suspect
symptoms. KTN’s Ian Wafula is at the border from where he filed
this story. – Standard
Digital
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