Photo Credit: Natural NewsBy J. D. Heyes.

Increasingly, as the Ebola virus continues to spread and kill, authorities in Africa are becoming more authoritarian in their attempts to contain the deadly disease — steps that look eerily similar to those imposed on Americans in the days following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and which could be imposed again were Ebola to make it to the U.S.

In Sierra Leone, authorities recently ordered people to remain inside their homes for three days later this month, ostensibly in a bid to shut down the spread of the virus, which has now killed nearly 2,300 people all across West Africa.

Abdulai Bayratay, a government spokesman, told The Associated Press that the government is ordering people to remain inside their houses on Sept. 19, 20 and 21. Those dates were chosen to allow people time to get what they needed — food, medicines and other provisions — ahead of the government’s movement ban.

“This will be strictly adhered to without exception,” he told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in a telephone interview. “We intend to ensure that the dreaded disease is checked.”

‘Movement ban’ could be extended longer than three days

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Photo Credit: Natural NewsNumber of Ebola cases is ‘increasing exponentially,’ World Health Organization warns

By Ethan A. Huff.

The Ebola crisis has taken a major turn for the worse as the World Health Organization (WHO) announces that the number of infected individuals is now “increasing exponentially.” The uptick is particularly concerning in Liberia, where the international agency says the worst is yet to come.

Among the 4,269 known cases of Ebola in West Africa, nearly 2,300, a little over half, have resulted in death. And roughly half of these deaths have occurred in Liberia, according to the United Nations, with the rest reportedly hailing from nearby Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria.

In a recent announcement, WHO warned that the numbers appear to show an exponential increase in infections across West Africa, and that things will get worse before getting better. Underscoring the unusual spread of the disease, experts say Ebola is particularly problematic in the larger cities, and especially in those where public health facilities are lacking.

But the situation is most extreme in Liberia, where entire communities are facing rapid infection due to poor containment measures and a lack of medical personnel. According to data compiled by WHO, some 152 healthcare workers in Liberia are known to have contracted Ebola, and 79 of them have already died.

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Photo Credit: CELLOU BINANI / AFP / GettyDespite knowing that he had symptoms of the Ebola virus, a Nigerian diplomat boards a plane in Liberia and flies from that small country to his nation’s capital city of Lagos, a city with 21 million people. The man was fleeing a quarantine meant to contain the Ebola virus. Instead, his body — now a host for the disease — was transporting the highly contagious and deadly, single-strand virus to Nigeria’s largest city. . .

The Nigerian doctor who visited the diplomat in his hotel room and became infected with Ebola also saw hundreds of patients — operating on at least two of them before he ultimately passed away from the disease. . .

With the possibility of the Ebola outbreak widening in the region and eventually spanning the globe, this writer reached out to Board Certified Internal Medicine specialist Dr. Jorge Rodriguez for more information. . .

In the brief discussion about the mysterious disease, Rodriguez shared some startling information, including, ”This thing is a lot more contagious than we’re being given . . . or we’re being told about.”

“What scares me the most . . . doctors and nurses are the ones getting this, dying from it and transmitting it,” Rodriguez added. “So, I think there’s a lot more about Ebola and how it’s transmitted that we don’t know . . . The head of the CDC said, ‘It’s much worse than what’s being reported . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s double or triple what we’re told.”

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Photo Credit: Newscom By Josh Siegel.

Dr. Kent Brantly, the American doctor infected with Ebola while working in West Africa, only saw Tim Mosher’s eyes.

As part of his mission in Liberia with the nonprofit aid group Samaritan’s Purse, Mosher treated Brantly, a colleague whom he had never formally met but whose life he was now helping save.

With six or so other aid workers, Mosher stayed at Brantly’s bedside and intravenously delivered him ZMapp, an experimental medicine that had never before been tested on humans.

“I thought he might die that night,” recalled Mosher, who was wearing a full-body suit, face mask, two pairs of gloves and goggles—only his eyes visible—to avoid contracting the illness that struck Brantly, a doctor with Samaritan’s Purse.

After spending 21 days in quarantine upon returning from Africa, Mosher spoke with The Daily Signal about his unplanned contact with Brantly, who ultimately survived Ebola after finishing his treatment in the United States.

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Photo Credit: Fox News Could the blood of Ebola survivors help patients?

By Associated Press.

As West Africa struggles to contain the biggest ever outbreak of Ebola, some experts say an unusual but simple treatment might help: the blood of survivors.

The evidence is mixed for using infection-fighting antibodies from survivors’ blood for Ebola, but without any licensed drugs or vaccines for the deadly disease, some say it’s worth a shot.

“This is something that’s fairly simple to do,” said Dr. Peter Piot, director of London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the co-discoverer of the Ebola virus.

Using blood of survivors is one of the experimental Ebola treatments under discussion at a two-day meeting that began Thursday in Geneva. The more than 200 experts assembled by the World Health Organization are looking at issues of safety and effectiveness and considering which treatments should be prioritized for testing during the current outbreak.

There are about a half dozen medicines and vaccines in development. None has been rigorously tested in humans but early testing of one vaccine began this week in the United States.

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As the Ebola epidemic threatens to overwhelm response efforts in West Africa, calls for international military assistance are picking up. The medical charity Doctors Without Borders called on world leaders to send military units with expertise in biohazard containment to combat the worst outbreak of the virus on record. The European Commission’s humanitarian arm (ECHO) is also calling for military medical intervention to combat the epidemic, including U.S. Army and Navy Seal protection teams. But ECHO health adviser Jorge Castilla-Echenique warned of the high financial costs involved in a “M.A.S.H. like operation” in an interview with Thomson Reuters Foundation. U.S. Army mobile surgical hospitals have the capacity to serve as fully functional health facilities, but they do not come cheap, he said…

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Grim Ebola prediction: outbreak is ‘unstoppable’ for now, says U.S. virologist

A doctor who just returned from treating Ebola patients in West Africa predicts the current Ebola outbreak will go on for more than a year, and will continue to spread unless a vaccine or other drugs that prevent or treat the disease are developed. Dr. Daniel Lucey, an expert on viral outbreaks and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, recently spent three weeks in Sierra Leone, one of the countries affected by the Ebola outbreak. While there, Lucey evaluated and treated Ebola patients, and trained other doctors and nurses on how to use protective equipment. The current Ebola outbreak, which is mainly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, has so far killed at least 1,552 of the more than 3,000 people infected, making it the largest and deadliest Ebola outbreak in history. It is also the first outbreak to spread from rural areas to cities. Strategies that have worked in the past to stop Ebola outbreaks in rural areas may not, by themselves, be enough to halt this outbreak, Lucey said. “I don’t believe that our traditional methods of being able to control and stop outbreaks in rural areas … is going to be effective in most of the cities,” Lucey said yesterday (Sept. 3) in a discussion held at Georgetown University Law Center that was streamed online.

While the World Health Organization has released a plan to stop Ebola transmission within six to nine months, “I think that this outbreak is going to go on even longer than a year,” Lucey said. In addition, without vaccines or drugs for Ebola, “I’m not confident we will be able to stop it,” Lucey said. There are a few studies of Ebola treatments and prevention methods under way, but more research is needed to show whether they are safe and effective against the disease. One strategy that could help with the current outbreak is to implement public health “command centers” whose job it is to make sure that tools and equipment sent to the affected regions are properly distributed to places that need them, Lucey said…

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