Photo Credit: Jack MooreBy Jeff Mason and James Harding Giahyue.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday called West Africa’s deadly Ebola outbreak a looming threat to global security and announced a major expansion of the U.S. role in trying to halt its spread, including deployment of 3,000 troops to the region.

“The reality is that this epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better,” Obama said at the Atlanta headquarters of the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“But, right now, the world still has an opportunity to save countless lives. Right now, the world has the responsibility to act, to step up and to do more. The United States of America intends to do more,” he added.
The U.S. plan, a dramatic expansion of Washington’s initial response last week, won praise from the U.N. World Health Organization, aid workers and officials in West Africa. Experts said it was still not enough to contain the epidemic, which is rapidly spreading and has caused already-weak local public health systems to buckle under the strain of fighting it.

U.S. officials said the focus of the military deployment would be Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves that is the hardest hit of the countries affected by the crisis.

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EBOLA SURVIVOR: NO TIME TO WASTE AS OBAMA UPS AID

BY LAURAN NEERGAARD AND JIM KUHNHENN.

An American doctor who survived Ebola said there’s no time to waste as President Barack Obama outlined his plan to ramp up the U.S. response to the epidemic in West Africa.

“We can’t afford to wait months, or even weeks, to take action, to put people on the ground,” Dr. Kent Brantly told senators Tuesday.

Obama called the Ebola crisis a threat to world security as he ordered up to 3,000 U.S. military personnel to the region along with an aggressive effort to train health care workers and deliver field hospitals. Under the plan, the government could end up devoting $1 billion to containing the disease.

“If the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people affected, with profound economic, political and security implications for all of us,” Obama said after briefings in Atlanta with doctors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from Emory University, where Brantly and two other aid workers with Ebola have been treated.

Obama acted under pressure from regional leaders and international aid organizations who pleaded for a heightened U.S. role in confronting the deadly virus. He called on other countries to also quickly supply more health workers, equipment and money.

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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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By The Extinction Protocol.

Today, the Ebola virus spreads only through direct contact with bodily fluids, such as blood and vomit. But some of the nation’s top infectious disease experts worry that this deadly virus could mutate and be transmitted just by a cough or a sneeze. “It’s the single greatest concern I’ve ever had in my 40-year public health career,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “I can’t imagine anything in my career — and this includes HIV — that would be more devastating to the world than a respiratory transmissible Ebola virus.” Osterholm and other experts couldn’t think of another virus that has made the transition from non-airborne to airborne in humans. They say the chances are relatively small that Ebola will make that jump. But as the virus spreads, they warned, the likelihood increases. Every time a new person gets Ebola, the virus gets another chance to mutate and develop new capabilities. Osterholm calls it “genetic roulette.” As of Friday, there have been 4,784 cases of Ebola, with 2,400 deaths, according to the World Health Organization, which says the virus is spreading at a much faster rate now than it was earlier in the outbreak.

Ebola is an RNA virus, which means every time it copies itself; it makes one or two mutations. Many of those mutations mean nothing, but some of them might be able to change the way the virus behaves inside the human body. “Imagine every time you copy an essay, you change a word or two. Eventually, it’s going to change the meaning of the essay,” said Dr. C.J. Peters, one of the heroes featured in “The Hot Zone.” That book chronicles the 1989 outbreak of Ebola Reston, which was transmitted among monkeys by breathing. In 2012, Canadian researchers found that Ebola Zaire, which is involved in the current outbreak, was passed from pigs to monkeys in the air…

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Photo Credit: APOXFORD STUDY: 15 CURRENTLY UNCONTAMINATED COUNTRIES AT RISK OF EBOLA OUTBREAK

By FRANCES MARTEL.

The largest Ebola outbreak in history, spanning five west African countries, continues to spread and threatens to engulf the infrastructures of multiple nations. The situation could get worse for the continent, according to one Oxford University study that finds animals carrying the virus are being eaten in at least 15 different countries at risk for an outbreak.

The Washington Post distills the results of the study, which focused on the migration and living habits of fruit bats, considered among the most dangerous carriers of Ebola. Fruit bats can transfer the Ebola virus to other animals like monkeys and rodents, all of which are often consumed in African countries as “bush meat,” a valuable source of protein in regions where the nutrient is difficult to come by.

Judging by the animal populations, researcher Nick Golding explains that the “likely ‘reservoir’ of Ebola virus in animal populations” and where humans come into contact with them paints a troubling picture. That reservoir of Ebola, waiting to be tapped by a hunter catching a contaminated animal and eating it undercooked, is “larger than has been previously appreciated,” according to Golding.

And that reservoir affects up to 22 countries, including those currently battling the virus: Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. All cases in West Africa can be traced back to one patient, a child in rural Guinea. The cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo are believed to be a second outbreak triggered by a different instance of humans eating bush meat; the current death toll there stands at 35, significantly less than the 2,288 killed in West Africa.

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