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Blair Peterson

As Ebola Rages, Poor Planning Thwarts Efforts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • But one piece is missing: staff. The facility opened recently with a skeleton crew. Now, in an especially hard-hit area where people are dying every day because they cannot get into an Ebola clinic, 60 of the 80 beds at the Kerry Town Ebola clinic are not being used.
  • It is like this with a lot here: good intentions, bad planning. Aid officials in Sierra Leone say poor coordination among aid groups, government mismanagement and some glaring inefficiencies are costing countless lives.
  • Even after patients recover, many treatment centers delay releasing them for more than a week until there are enough other survivors, sometimes dozens, to hold one huge goodbye ceremony for everyone — again, keeping desperately needed beds occupied. “I just wanted to get home and see my wife,” said Suliman Wafta, a recent Ebola survivor treated nearby. “But I had to wait eight extra days.
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  • “Why are the British here? To end Ebola, or party?” read a headline in a local newspaper. It added, “While their American counterparts are working hard to end Ebola in Liberia, our so-called colonial masters are busy living the life of Riley.”
  • Like others, the official kept citing the “Brits’ primacy” in Sierra Leone — a reference to how, several months ago, Western powers divided Ebola responsibilities in West Africa along historical lines, with the United States helping Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves in 1822; France helping a former colony, Guinea; and Britain helping its own former colony, Sierra Leone.
  • Many aid officials in Sierra Leone said they crave a more effective command structure. The government runs a national emergency center, but aid officials said that with scores of foreign experts, government delegations and private charities flocking here, coordination was still messy, with many gaps and overlaps. It is extremely difficult, they said, to get even the most basic information, including how many treatment centers exist.
  • There are also growing questions about corruption, with the government announcing recently that it had found 6,000 “ghost medical workers” on its payroll, even as real Ebola burial teams and front-line health officers say they have not been paid in weeks.
Blair Peterson

One Powerful Illustration Shows Exactly What's Wrong With How the West Talks About Ebol... - 4 views

  • We can see this clearly on Fox News, where Andrea Tantaros parroted the idea that African countries "do not believe in traditional medical care" and that residents might "seek treatment from a witch doctor that practices santería." Congressman Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) suggested that we should fear migrants because they might carry "deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis," while CNN suggested Ebola is the "ISIS of biological agents." (It's no coincidence that both are "foreign" entities.)   
Blair Peterson

One Year Later, Ebola Outbreak Offers Lessons for Next Epidemic - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The effort has been messy, inefficient and expensive, often lagging the epidemic’s twists in tragic ways.
  • Despite difficulty filling positions, the W.H.O. now reports that it has more than 700 people working at 77 field sites, the largest emergency response in its history.
  • Charities with no background treating Ebola patients began running hospitals specialized for Ebola care, some of which were built by militaries and others staffed by hundreds of personnel from China and Cuba who were also facing Ebola for the first time and trying to overcome language challenges.
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  • “The level of resourcefulness and dedication shown by Sierra Leoneans involved in the front lines is the most extraordinary civic mobilization action I’ve ever seen in my country,” said O. B. Sisay, director of the situation room at the National Ebola Response Center in Freetown, which formerly housed a special war crimes court. “To some extent that has helped cement a sense of nationhood here.”
  • Reforms have been proposed, but agencies have been slow to acknowledge their mistakes publicly and reckon with them, decreasing the chances that change will occur.
  • InterAction, an alliance of United States-based relief and development groups. “I sat in on a lot of discussions of InterAction in the fall over insurance and medical evacuation.”
  • million budget has been raised so far, a W.H.O. spokeswoman said.
Blair Peterson

Ebola Emergency Appeal - King's Alumni Online - 1 views

  • King’s is at the heart of the international response and, as key advisors in the area, the UK government wants other organisations to replicate the model KSLP have in place for identifying, isolating and treating Ebola.
  • ing's has access to a pool of highly-qualified infectious disease specialists whose skills and knowledge are desperately needed during this emergency. We need funds to cover their basic costs such as flights and accommodation. We also require further supplies which are used specifically during an Ebola outbreak, such as personal protection suits, gloves and chlorine
Blair Peterson

New Ebola Cases May Soon Reach 10,000 a Week, Officials Predict - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • The Security Council in September passed a resolution that declared Ebola a threat to international peace and security. On Tuesday, it heard sobering alarms about Ebola’s widening impact on the region.
  • Hervé Ladsous, the under secretary general for peacekeeping, told the Council that 39 peacekeepers in Liberia were currently “under quarantine or are being closely watched for possible exposure.”
  • While the United States, Canada and Britain have taken emergency steps to screen international passengers to limit the risk of importing Ebola, most of Europe is still struggling with that issue.
Blair Peterson

Epidemic Ethics: Four Lessons from the Current Ebola Outbreak - Australian Institute of... - 0 views

  • The spread of Ebola virus occurs because health infrastructure in the region is fragmented, under-resourced, or non-existent. And the therapeutic response to the illness is constrained by failure of markets to drive drug and vaccine development that would help the world’s
  • But drugs and a vaccine are being sent to the region, after a ruling from an ethics panel convened by the World Health Organization decided their use was acceptable even though they haven’t been definitively shown to be safe or effective.
  • Think about it this way: if Ebola virus outbreaks had occurred in New York, London, or Sydney, effective therapies surely would have been developed long ago.
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  • The second is to accept that we must act to treat infection and reduce its spread, as the WHO has already done, by approving the fast-tracking of compassionate access to promising but still untested medications and vaccines.
Blair Peterson

Global Response to Ebola Highlights Challenges - 1 views

  • A senior European diplomat in Geneva involved in health issues, who was not authorized to speak publicly, lamented the limited international response. “The scale of the epidemic is what the international community is still not getting,” the diplomat said. “It’s becoming obvious that what you need is to scale up by a factor of 20. There’s not enough international coordination and imagination going into this.”
  • uba sent 165 doctors and nurses last week, China has expanded a medical team deployed there, and British personnel are scouting sites for at least five new centers and 700 additional beds that will bring the total closer to the World Health Organization’s target of about 1,300 beds.
  • United States delivers on a pledge to provide up to 17 100-bed units, said Dr. Ian Norton, who is coordinating foreign medical teams for the W.H.O. In Guinea, the W.H.O. says there are four treatment centers working with 160 beds available, with 100 more beds needed.
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  • The World Food Program, acting beyond its core mandate as the United Nations agency responsible for fighting hunger, is also joining the drive, planning to build up to 30 Ebola treatment centers capable of handling 3,000 patients, said Denise Brown, the agency’s regional director for West Africa.
  • American troops are already on the ground in Liberia to build treatment centers, and Britain announced on Wednesday that it would send about 600 military personnel to Sierra Leone to build units and train local staff members. But it remains unclear who will manage and operate the units.
  • After Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines at the end of 2013, the W.H.O. had the support of 151 aid agencies. Six months into the Ebola crisis in three countries, only four medical organizations are on the ground.
Blair Peterson

Lockdown Begins in Sierra Leone to Battle Ebola - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The United States is planning to build as many as 17 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia, with about 1,700 treatment beds, while the United Nations is planning an expanded mission in the region, based in Accra, Ghana, according to Anthony Banbury, the United Nation’s Ebola operation crisis manager. It is intended to be more nimble than the United Nations’ notoriously bureaucratic operations, bringing in as many as 500 trucks and jeeps from other missions in Africa, possibly paying teams in one country to speed up safe burials, buying fuel for monitoring teams in another country, or offering helicopters to transport health workers where they are needed.
  • Whether Sierra Leone’s lockdown will constitute an effective response is open to question. Despite the mobilization, the volunteers hardly appeared to be thick on the ground. In some neighborhoods, residents said they were yet to see any of the green-vested young men and women who had volunteered.
Blair Peterson

Despite Aid Push, Ebola Is Raging in Sierra Leone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    "Despite Aid Push, Ebola Is Raging in Sierra Leone"
Blair Peterson

The Ebola Outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone - 0 views

  • The Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS) created a ‘solidarity fund’ to contain and manage the outbreak, [17] and the World Health Organisation convened an emergency meeting of regional health ministers in Accra to strengthen surveillance operations and facilitate cross-border consultations. [18] The World Health Organisation also opened a Sub-Regional Outbreak Coordinating Center in Conakry. [19] Doctors Without Borders has deployed 300 personnel to assist in health care facilities, and both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the European Union have provided scientific personnel and resources to assist with laboratory testing and government coordination. [20]
  • The World Health Organisation fulfilled its coordinating mission by organising a meeting of regional health officials in Accra in early July—but that was three-and-a-half months after the first report of the disease. WHO’s Sub-Regional Outbreak Coordination Center has the potential to be a useful resource, but it took nearly four months from the outbreak’s beginning until WHO began such operations. Given how quickly Ebola spreads and its virulence, such a delay helped the disease gain a foothold in the region. Arresting the spread of infectious diseases requires quicker action.
  • First, the current response needs to be ratcheted up. Opening sub-regional command centers, deploying personnel from governmental and nongovernmental sources, and providing financial resources are all important—but they need to be done in greater number and with greater urgency. The initial efforts are not necessarily failures; they are just too small and slow in response to the overwhelming nature of this unprecedented outbreak.
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  • Second, efforts to provide health care services and outreach to affected communities need to take concerted efforts to integrate local cultural contexts and health care measures into Ebola control.
  • Third, there need to be serious long-term efforts to improve the health care systems, disease surveillance capabilities, and laboratory resources in all three states.
Blair Peterson

Better Staffing Seen as Crucial to Ebola Treatment in Africa - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Most of the patients in the United States also received experimental drugs or plasma transfusions, but doctors say rehydration played a major role in saving them.
  • Ebola wards need an unusually high level of staffing, Dr. Sprecher said. Not only does each patient require a lot of care, but the protective gear causes health workers to overheat so quickly and severely, especially in wards that lack air-conditioning in bare-bones facilities, that they cannot work for more than an hour without coming out to cool down. Extra workers are needed so that they can spell each other.
Blair Peterson

As U.S. Steps Up Fight, J.F.K. Begins Screening Passengers for Ebola - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Kennedy was the first of five American airports to introduce Ebola screening protocols, and the new measures were the latest indication of the risk that the disease presented.
  • Beginning next week, Washington Dulles, Newark Liberty, Chicago O’Hare and Atlanta international airports will employ the same screenings as those put in place at J.F.K.
  • Since at least the 14th century, when the bubonic plague devastated Europe, posting medical officers at a port of entry has been one of the main tools used to try to halt the spread of disease.An outbreak of yellow fever in 1878 led the United States Congress to grant the federal government the authority to order a quarantine to prevent its spread.
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  • Those powers were enhanced in 1892 to try to prevent another scourge, cholera
Blair Peterson

As Ebola Ebbs in Africa, Focus Turns From Death to Life - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • While many have emphasized the enormous assistance hauled into the region by the United States and international organizations, there is strong evidence, especially here in Monrovia, that the biggest change came from the precautions taken by residents themselves.“Fundamentally, this is about the extent to whi
  • Reeling from the explosion of infections in August, volunteer Ebola watchdog groups sprang up in many neighborhoods, typically overseen by local elders and led by educated youths, drawing from a long history of community organizing to survive war, poverty and government neglect.
  • “Heroes emerged in every community,” said Dr. Mosoka Fallah, a Harvard-trained Liberian epidemiologist who often acted as a liaison between neighborhoods and the government. “The volunteer task forces may be the biggest reason behind the drop in October.”
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  • He said that the region’s chiefs enlisted the traditional leaders in the area and put together bylaws that barred residents from hiding their sick, interfering with health workers or carrying out traditional burials that increased the risk of spreading the disease by touching infected corpses.
  • We threatened that anybody who tried to do a traditional burial would be banished from the chiefdom,” he said
Blair Peterson

allAfrica.com: Liberia: Ebola Private Sector Mobilization Group Formed to Fight Ebola - 4 views

  • s such our platform is comprised of the following: 1. To remain in the region and be apart of the nation’s long-term economic and social recovery and development. 2. To ensure employees, families and communities are aware of the disease and are taking the best precautions to avoid infection and stigma. 3. To share experiences and resources, including trained personnel and practices, to assist governments and partners to mobilize quickly to control the spread of the disease. 4. To offer loan or gift-appropriate assets and resources essential to the deployment of an integrated response by donors, militaries, host governments, NGOs and community-based organizations. 5. To make available information about needs of various organizations and first responders, so that they may be connected with corporate giving. 6. To commit to learning from this outbreak and working together to support a strong healthcare system in the affected counties. 7. To raise international awareness and advocate for a larger global coordinated effort to combat Ebola. 8. To advocate for open trade and humanitarian corridors by air, land and sea.
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Blair Peterson

Ebola and U.S. National Security - 0 views

  • The U.S. government is sending flimsy plastic aprons and gauze masks to the Africans with assurances that the donning and removal processes are where the majority of the risk to caregivers is realized. This is simply not true. As is evident by the precautions currently being taken in the U.S. and other developed countries, multiple layers of protection are employed by health workers, and cadavers are treated as highly infectious.
  • President Obama has sent nearly 5,000 members of the U.S. military to West Africa to assist in trying to stop the spread of the disease for a very good reason — the problem is quickly spinning out of control, and has the potential to become a serious national security concern.
  • Since 2010, the Department of Defense has partnered with Tekmira Pharmaceuticals to develop a vaccine for Ebola. Tekmira was given ‘fast track’ authority to develop a vaccine earlier this year.
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  • n the interim, if a member of Boko Haram, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or Al Shabaab were inclined to spread the disease from Africa to the U.S. or Europe, all he or she would have to do is become infected and travel to these countries before becoming symptomatic.
Blair Peterson

Ebola Crisis: Africa Needs More Home-Trained Doctors - 0 views

  • One of the worst parts of the crisis is that the countries affected are being abandoned. Several airlines have cancelled flights, non-governmental agencies are calling their personnel home, and neighboring countries have closed their borders. Consequently, even those doctors and nurses recruited by foreign charities have difficulty accessing the countries.
  • The Ebola epidemic has overwhelmed its health professionals. With four million people, Liberia has only 200 doctors and 1,500 nurses, most of whom are in and around the capital of Monrovia.
  • As with most emergencies in developing countries, it is their health professionals that provide most of the care to their citizens. They are in a better position than the brave volunteers from foreign charities to manage a crisis, since they know the country’s customs, language, and are there for the long haul. However, one of the major problems faced by poor countries is the inadequate number of trained health workers.
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  • It is, however, impossible to have decent schools and health systems without having the teachers and health professionals to staff them, and these are educated in universities. And the universities should be located in the countries themselves. The practice has been to send most of the young people abroad to study for advanced degrees to countries like Canada. The problem is that most do not return, adding to the brain drain. There are more Ethiopian doctors in New York City than in Ethiopia.
  • A better approach is to assist developing countries improve their universities. There is a substantial demand from these countries for help to improve teaching, research and back office operations.
Blair Peterson

Despite Aid Push, Ebola Is Raging in Sierra Leone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Discouraged, scared and furious, Sierra Leoneans are taking matters into their own hands. Laid-off teachers (all schools in this country are closed) race around on motorbikes, monitoring the sick.
  • Sierra Leone has an elaborate Ebola response system — on paper. It starts with a call to 117, the toll-free number for central dispatch. A surveillance team is sent out, then an ambulance takes a patient to a holding center, then blood tests and a proper treatment center where the patient might receive intravenous fluids or other special care.
  • “You can have as many helicopters, ships and kit here as you’d like,” said Lt. Colonel Matt Petersen, a British adviser. “But unless you change behavior, it’s not going to stop transmission.”
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  • Public health professionals are beginning to look harder at Sierra Leone’s culture, which is dominated by secret men’s and women’s societies that have certain rituals, especially around burials. Many people here — just like in other cultures — believe that the afterlife is more important than this one. A proper burial, in which the body is touched and carefully washed, is the best way to ensure a soul reaches its destination.
  • Seventy percent of new cases here, Western officials said, are directly linked to traditional burials.
  • Another issue are strikes. This week, burial workers in eastern Sierra Leone dragged corpses from a morgue and dumped them outside to protest delays in being paid. In Freetown last week, some surveillance workers — the emergency medical workers to suspected cases — refused to work, demanding back pay, which added to the problems of dispatching ambulances.
smenegh Meneghini

BBC News - Ebola crisis: Why is the UN response taking so long? - 4 views

  • But it is only now, four or six months later, that the great machine of the so-called "international community", the United Nations, is lumbering into action.
  • Imagine trying to set up and run a medium sized multinational company. But then imagine trying to set it up in countries with very bad roads and electricity supply, dodgy telecommunications and mostly badly-educated populations
  • To establish your "multinational company" you have to do some mundane tasks. You have to bring in people from all over the world. Then you have to feed and house them. You have to get them cars and desks and telephones. You have to make sure each bit of the machine knows what the other bits are doing. And that's before your aid workers can move to the front line and actually do their job.
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    Continue reading the main story Ebola has only really hit the big international headlines in the last few weeks. During that same period, readers may well have also heard about the various aid agencies which are helping out. So, a not unreasonable impression may have formed - that there's a big problem, but it's being dealt with.
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