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Blair Peterson

BBC News - Ebola crisis: Five ways to break the epidemic - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-29242842

International Relations Ebola

shared by Blair Peterson on 24 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has urged other countries to "deploy their civil defence and military assets, and medical teams, to contain the epidemic".
  • "As soon as their family member shows more severe symptoms, like bleeding, they will seek to bring them in a treatment centre anyway," says Brice de la Vigne, MSF's director of operations.
  • Senegal, where many UN agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have their regional offices, is expected to become a logistical hub.
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  • "If the CDC (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention) hadn't sent 50 experts to Nigeria, they would not have it under control," Dr Maughan says.
  • "We are working with the authorities in Mali to get all the 86 health centres and hospitals we sponsor there ready," says Alexis Smigielski, head of the Dakar-based medical charity Alima.
  • The WHO has also indicated that people who have survived can now provide blood to treat patients who are sick.
Blair Peterson

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

www.internationalaffairs.org.au/...rom-the-current-ebola-outbreak

Ebola International Relations Global Public Health

shared by Blair Peterson on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • 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

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

www.nytimes.com/...lessons-for-next-epidemic.html

International Relations ebola Public Health

shared by Blair Peterson on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • 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

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

www.nytimes.com/...-epidemic-who-west-africa.html

International Relations Ebola

shared by Blair Peterson on 19 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • 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.
smenegh Meneghini

Framing Health and Foreign Policy: lessons for global health diplomacy - 10 views

www.biomedcentral.com/...1744-8603-6-14.pdf

Ebola International Relations health_diplomacy

shared by smenegh Meneghini on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • smenegh Meneghini on 23 Oct 14
     
    This article talks about how health is becoming part of diplomacy and how it is being discussed as part of security: "Several governments have issued specific foreign policy statements on global health and a new term, global health diplomacy , has been coined to describe the processes by which state and non-state actors engage to position health issues more prominently in foreign policy decision-making". "Security, alongside development, is the most recently encountered frame in the documents we reviewed, with the securitization of health now claimed to be a permanent feature of public health governance in the 21st century. Although "health security" is recent in coinage, its history dates back at least to the 14th century when epidemics threatened to destabilize sovereign power and to compromise the material interest of the elite groups".
  • smenegh Meneghini on 06 Nov 14
Blair Peterson

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

www.internationalpolicydigest.org/...ica-needs-home-trained-doctors

International Relations ebola Public Health

shared by Blair Peterson on 16 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • 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

Global Response to Ebola Highlights Challenges - 1 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...llenges-in-delivering-aid.html

Ebola

shared by Blair Peterson on 11 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • 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

Fight to stop Ebola being lost, World Bank warns - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...ing-lost-World-Bank-warns.html

World Bank Ebola International Relations

shared by Blair Peterson on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • "We are losing the battle," World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim warned, blaming a lack of international solidarity in efforts to stem the epidemic.
  • "Certain countries are only worried about their own borders," he told reporters in Paris.
  • The East African Community bloc comprising Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania announced it was sending more than 600 health workers to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
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