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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.
Blair Peterson

Larry Brilliant is humanity's best hope against the next pandemic (Wired UK) - 1 views

  • The key goals of the pandemics team at the SGTF are detecting an outbreak faster, verifying that it's a real sign and getting a connected network of people to talk about what's going on.
Blair Peterson

Dear America: Don't Panic About Ebola. Seriously. | TakePart - 0 views

  • Our strategy for eradicating smallpox in the first instance was mass vaccination—vaccinate everybody in the room. Well, that didn’t work.
  • We’re able to isolate in an almost perfect way once he enters into isolation, so we reduce the density of susceptibles down to zero. Either there’s nobody in the room with him, or people in the room are wearing space suits. If there are no suspeptibles around you, it doesn’t matter how bad the disease is once you’re in a room and there’s no one you can catch the disease from.
  • Why do we see it in Liberia and Guinea? Because these are the poorest countries in the world, and they are all post-conflict. Their public health systems and economies are in shambles, and in America, we don’t understand because for us, if you go to Canton, Ohio, California or New York, they’re all part of the United States.
smenegh Meneghini

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

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    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".
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

http://www.who.int/trade/resource/en/Negotiating.pdf?ua=1 - 0 views

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    World Health Organization Book on strategies for international health professionals.
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