Problem

submitted by George Hurlburt

Yaovi Gaffa, 20, chained in a room at a prayer camp near Lomé, Togo, in April. Chaining is a last resort for families in West Africa where psychiatry is virtually unknown. Credit Joao Silva/The New York Times

nytimes.com - by Benedict Carey - October 11, 2015

KPOVÉ, Togo — The church grounds here sprawled through a strange, dreamlike forest. More than 150 men and women were chained by the ankle to a tree or concrete block, a short walk from the central place of worship. Most were experiencing the fearsome delusions of schizophrenia.

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bushchicken.com - by Zeze Ballah - August 20, 2015

VOINJAMA, Lofa – An investigation conducted by The Bush Chicken has established that scores of livestock in Lofa died from Peste des Petit Ruminants, or Ovine Rinderpest. . . .

. . . Over 1,000 farmers in Zorzor and Kolahun districts, including the towns Tenebu and Samodu, lost livestock to Peste des Petit Ruminants. . . .

. . . When contacted for comments, Lofa’s Agriculture Coordinator Theophilus Baah confirmed The Bush Chicken investigation and said the ministry has not been providing vaccines to animals prior to the recent outbreak.

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afro.who.int

Bamako, 7 September 2015 – A case of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) has been confirmed in Bamako, the capital and largest city of Mali. The country is on high alert after national authorities detected a paralysis case with onset 20 July 2015. The patient is a 19-month old child of Guinean nationality whose paralysis occurred 7 days prior to the child’s arrival in Bamako to seek health care. The last case of wild polio virus (WPV) in Mali dates back to June 2011 in Goundam, Timbuktu Region.

The current detected virus is genetically linked to a confirmed VDPV detected in Siguiri district, in the Kankan Region of Guinea in August 2014, and has been circulating across international borders for more than 2 years without detection. 

The risk of spread of this virus is deemed high and it has the capacity to cause paralytic disease in humans or kill. The emergence and circulation of VDPV2 reveals low population immunity against the virus due to low rates of vaccination coverage in Guinea. Consequently, oral polio vaccine (OPV) must be administered multiple times to stop the outbreak and protect children. 

ASSOCIATED PRESS  by Carley Petesch              Aug. 23, 2015

DAKAR, Senegal --Lingering health problems afflicting many of the roughly 13,000 Ebola survivors have galvanized global and local health officials to find out how widespread the ailments are, and how to remedy them.

The World Health Organization calls it an emergency within an emergency. Many of the survivors have vision and hearing issues. Some others experience physical and emotional pains, fatigue and other problems. The medical community is negotiating uncharted waters as it tries to measure the scale of this problem that comes on the tail end of the biggest Ebola outbreak in history.

"If we can find out this kind of information, hopefully we can help other Ebola survivors in the future," Dr. Zan Yeong, an eye specialist involved in a study of health problems in survivors in Liberia, told The Associated Press.

About 7,500 people will enroll — 1,500 Ebola survivors and 6,000 of their close contacts — and will be monitored over a five-year period in the study launched by Partnership for Research on Ebola Vaccines in Liberia, or PREVAIL.

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