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REPORTS Of RESEARCH ON TWO METHODS OF RAPID TESTING FOR EBOLA

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MEDICAL PRESS                                                                                     Dec. 8, 2014

Rutgers researcher David Alland, working with the California biotechnology company Cepheid, has received a grant of nearly $640,000 from the National Institutes of Health to develop a rapid test to diagnose Ebola as well as other viruses that can cause symptoms similar to Ebola.

Researchers will adapt this cartridge, now used worldwide for tuberculosis screenings, to collect and test samples from potential Ebola patients. Credit: John Emerson

Alland, a professor of medicine and associate dean for clinical research at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and the principal investigator of the project, says health workers would be able to take the test to small villages and other remote locations where the spread of Ebola has been especially rampant and diagnose patients where they live...

THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL by Kelly Grant                Dec.7, 2014

When the World Health Organization declared Nigeria officially Ebola-free in October, most of the fanfare centred on how Africa’s most populous country had managed to keep the virus from spreading.

But there was another, less heralded aspect of Nigeria’s success story that a Canadian doctor and her colleagues wanted to explore in more depth: How had 12 of Nigeria’s 20 Ebola patients beaten the virus?

The hospitals in Nigeria weren’t maybe to the standards of a Western hospital in terms of equipment, but the staff were phenomenal. They managed to get a very high survival rate,” said Eilish Cleary, a New Brunswick chief medical officer of health who travelled to Nigeria to provide epidemiological support to the World Health Organization during the outbreak. “Case fatality rate for Ebola can be up to 70 to 90 per cent. In Nigeria, it was 40 per cent.”

Dr. Cleary conducted detailed, videotaped interviews with six of the Nigerian patients to learn more about their treatment and recovery. The key to their survival seemed to be guzzling a stunning amount of water with oral rehydration solution [ORS] to fend off the cascade of internal failures typically caused by the virus.

THE ECONOMIST                                                                                                      Dec. 4, 2014

THE first reported case in the Ebola outbreak ravaging west Africa dates back to December 2013, in Guéckédou, a forested area of Guinea near the border with Liberia and Sierra Leone. Travellers took it across the border: by late March, Liberia had reported eight suspected cases and Sierra Leone six. By the end of June 759 people had been infected and 467 people had died from the disease, making this the worst ever Ebola outbreak. The numbers keep climbing. As of November 30th, 17,145 cases and 6,070 deaths had been reported worldwide, the vast majority of them in these same three countries. Many suspect these estimates are badly undercooked.

Read complete posting
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/12/ebola-graphics

Link to an interactive map of the virus's current global reach:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/12/interactive-ebola-map

Additonal  Nigerian and British health workers arrive in Liberia and Sierra Leone to help counter Ebola

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REUTERS  by James Harding Giahyue and Umaru Fofana   Dec. 5, 2014
MONROVIA/FREETOWN --More than 175 Nigerian medics arrived in Liberia and Sierra Leone on Friday to join the fight against Ebola, the first of 600 volunteers promised by the regional giant which contained its own outbreak earlier this year.

An army medic teaches NHS staff how to dispose of potentially contaminated waste last month, before their deployment to Sierra Leone. Photograph: Simon Davis/AFP/Getty Images

The medics will boost weak local health systems that are also struggling to contain other preventable diseases as Ebola discourages people from going to clinics for fear of contracting the fever.

"This is the African spirit you are showing, this is the Nigerian spirit,” Nigeria's ambassador to Liberia, Chigozie Obi-Nnadozie, told 76 Nigerian medics who landed there.

Another 100 volunteers landed in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Months into the Ebola response, experts say they are still short of medical personnel to staff treatment centers.