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CONAKRY (Reuters) - Staff with the World Health Organisation battling an Ebola outbreak in West Africa see evidence the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimates the scale of the outbreak, the U.N. agency said on its website on Thursday.
Case identification and detection, contact tracing and patient clinical assessment and management are not the object of this Guidance document and instructions can be found elsewhere.1, 2 However, regarding IPC measures to be implemented during interviews for contact tracing and case finding in the community, the following principles should be kept in mind: 1) shaking hands should be avoided; 2) a distance of more than one metre (about 3 feet) should be maintained between interviewer and interviewee; 3) PPE is not required if this distance is assured and when interviewing asymptomatic individuals (e.g., neither fever, nor diarrhoea, bleeding or vomiting) and provided there will be no contact with the environment, potentially contaminated with a possible/probable case;] 4) it is advisable to provide workers undertaking contact tracing and case finding in the community with alcohol-based hand rub solutions and instructions to appropriately perform hand hygiene.
Is it just a matter of containing and telling people to wash the hell up regularly? I'm very ignorant about it.
There's no scientific way of knowing exactly how wrong the official numbers are, says Joseph Fair, an infectious disease doctor who has been acting as a special adviser to the health minister of Sierra Leone. "At a bare minimum, I would guess they're probably off by 20 percent," he says.
"They think it's likely a bit underreported, but not substantially," Fauci says. The number of people affected is not likely to be "many, many, many-fold greater" than what the WHO has estimated, he added.
"The scale of the current Ebola epidemic is unprecedented in terms of geographical distribution, people infected and deaths," MSF said in a statement yesterday.
The rapid spread of the disease, which is deadly in up to 90 per cent of cases, has overwhelmed aid agencies and health workers and terrified local communities.
"The epidemic is now out of control," said Bart Janssens, MSF director of operations. "With the appearance of new sites in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, there is a real risk of it spreading to other areas."
18 Aug 2014 cases: 2,473 deaths: 1,350
originally posted by: Floydshayvious
Is it just a matter of containing and telling people to wash the hell up regularly? I'm very ignorant about it.
The scale of the world's worst Ebola outbreak has been concealed by families hiding infected loved ones in their homes and the existence of "shadow zones" that medics cannot enter, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.
The U.N. agency issued a statement detailing why the outbreak in West Africa had been underestimated, following criticism that it had moved too slowly to contain the killer virus, now spreading out of control.
One of her colleagues at the CDC who's worked in Liberia says preliminary data shows they could be missing 40 to 60% of the contacts of known Ebola patients.
CDC Director on Ebola Outbreak: “It’s going to get even worse”
(CNN) — The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is much worse than official figures show, and other countries are unintentionally making it harder to control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden told CNN Tuesday.
“We’ve seen outbreaks of Ebola before. This is the first epidemic spreading widely through many countries and it is spiraling out of control,” said Frieden, who recently returned from a trip to the region. “It’s bad now, much worse than the numbers show. It’s going to get even worse in the very near future.”
World Bank: Poor response to Ebola causing needless deaths
The world's "disastrously inadequate response" to West Africa's Ebola outbreak means many people are dying needlessly, the head of the World Bank said on Monday, as Nigeria confirmed another case of the virus. ….
……….Doctors Without Borders has warned about a worldwide shortage of the full-body protective suits worn by Ebola health-care workers. Sierra Leone’s Ebola emergency operations center said it faces a six-week wait for the specialized ambulances needed to transport Ebola patients.
Dr Frieden added: 'Ebola is a huge risk in Africa. It's not going to be a huge risk in the U.S.' - See more at: www.georgianewsday.com... ker-infected-with-the-horrific-disease-is-set-to-land-on-american-soil-tomorrow.html#sthash.CCX3EqBB.dpuf
"We can stop worrying about it here when it's controlled there," Frieden said. "I could not overstate the need for an urgent response."
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The international group Doctor Without Borders warned Tuesday that the world is losing the battle against Ebola and lamented that treatment centers in West Africa have been "reduced to places where people go to die alone."
In separate remarks after a United Nations meeting on the crisis, the World Health Organization chief said everyone involved had underestimated the outbreak, which has now killed more than 1,500 people in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. U.N. officials implored governments worldwide to send medical workers...
(CNN) - The Ebola outbreak is much worse than official figures show and is "spiraling out of control," a leading U.S. official said Tuesday -- due in part, he said, to some countries that inadvertently have made it harder to corral the deadly disease.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Tom Frieden offered his stark commentary to CNN a day after Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, voiced dissatisfaction with the world response so far.
On Tuesday, a group called Serving in Mission announced that another American -- a doctor working in Liberia's capital --- had tested positive for Ebola.
The doctor, whose name was not released, was not treating Ebola patients and it's not known how he contracted the disease, SIM USA said. One of the other Americans infected with Ebola, Nancy Writebol, also was working on a SIM USA mission.
The unnamed American doctor immediately isolated himself upon the onset of symptoms, and is currently in an Ebola isolation unit, the group said.
In laboratory settings, non-human primates exposed to aerosolized ebolavirus from pigs have become infected, however, airborne transmission has not been demonstrated between non-human primates [1] [10] [15] [44] [45].
Viral shedding has been observed in nasopharyngeal secretions and rectal swabs of pigs following experimental inoculation [29] [30]
Some microorganisms are transmitted by more than one route:
Chicken pox – Airborne and Contact
Ebola- Contact, Droplet and Airborne
(this shows how understaffed they are)People still hide in the villages when they see the MSF ambulances arrive, and some of the ones who arrive at the treatment centers, cannot be admitted because we're so overwhelmed. We have started doing home-based treatment, but it's a difficult choice and we have to trust that the families will treat their relatives appropriately and not expose themselves to the disease
(This is good news)Thank you! No reason why Ebola should mutate to an airborne virus. It survives in body fluids, but not on dry surfaces due to it's lipid membrane.
(Secondary effects I've not seem mentioned elsewhere)The implications are huge. A deconstructed health system with half of the medical population decimated, a lack of trust in health facilities from the population, and apart from all of the Ebola cases and deaths, all of the non-Ebola cases and deaths that are not being managed, and that are probably in the 10s of thousands.
(This is bad news)[–]Schrodingers_Nachos 10 points an hour ago
Is there an end in sight?
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[–]ELasry[S] 22 points an hour ago
Not if the response is not substantially upscaled