Defense Minister on Ebola: Millions Will Die, the Opportunity to Stop the Plague Has Been Missed
Ebola Virologist: fight against Ebola outbreaks in Sierra Leone and Liberia is already lost – 5 million people could die
The killer virus is spreading like wildfire, Liberia’s defense minister said on Tuesday he pleaded for UN assistance. A German Ebola expert tells DW the virus must “burn itself out” in that part of the world. His statement might alarm many people. But Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg told DW that he and his colleagues are losing hope for Sierra Leone and Liberia, two of the countries worst hit by the recent Ebola epidemic. “The right time to get this epidemic under control in these countries has been missed,” he said. That time was May and June. “Now it is too late.” Schmidt-Chanasit expects the virus will “burn itself out” in this part of the world. With other words: It will more or less infect everybody and half of the population – in total about five million people – could die. Stop the virus from spilling over to other countries. Schmidt-Chanasit knows that it is a hard thing to say. He stresses that he doesn’t want international help to stop. Quite the contrary: He demands “massive help.” For Sierra Leone and Liberia, though, he thinks “it is far from reality to bring enough help there to get a grip on the epidemic.” According to the virologist, the most important thing to do now is to prevent the virus from spreading to other countries, “and to help where it is still possible, in Nigeria and Senegal for example.” Moreover, much more money has to be put into evaluating suitable vaccines, he added.
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New study says Ebola very likely to spread internationally – modest risk for US and UK for now
Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States are the countries projected to have more than a modest risk (<5%) for case exportations through international travel from the most affected countries, according to researchers who modeled the potential spread of EVD. “I would say this is good news at the moment, in the sense that our system should be pretty well equipped to cope with importation events,” senior author Alessandro Vespignani, PhD, Sternberg Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, told Medscape Medical News in a telephone interview. “Actually, in our country, we should be able to contain it. We do not expect to see a large number of cases.” To estimate EVD spread, Marcelo F.C. Gomes, PhD, from the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-Technical Systems, which Dr. Vespignani directs at Northeastern University, and colleagues analyzed data from the World Health Organization’s Disease Outbreaks News. The researchers used the university’s Global Epidemic and Mobility Model (GLEaM) to divide the world population into geographic census areas defined around transportation hubs. They integrated those data with data from the Socioeconomic Data and Application Center (SEDAC) at Columbia University in New York City and analyzed data from the International Air Transportation Association and Official Airline Guide databases.
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Airline transmission: Ebola infected passenger lands in Nigeria – Ebola evacuations to US greater than previously known
DailyPost has just been informed that a South African woman identified as Folswe Elizabeth Maria has just been arrested at the Lagos International Airport after showing signs of the dreaded Ebola Virus Disease. Operatives at the airport arrested the woman when she disembarked from the Air Morok flight. After a quick virus test was conducted on her, report says she showed positive result and was immediately arrested. She was from Casablanca in Morocco. Our Airport source said she was quarantined and taken away almost immediately. –Daily Post
High number of evacuees flown to US: An undisclosed number of people who’ve been exposed to the Ebola virus — not just the four patients publicly identified with diagnosed cases — have been evacuated to the U.S. by an air ambulance company contracted by the State Department. “We moved a lot of other people who had an exposure event,” said Dent Thompson, vice president of Phoenix Air Group. “Many times these people are just fine, they just had an exposure. But you have to treat it as though the disease is present…”
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