Ebola From Belgium To Congo!

By Johan Dongen

Medical research and investigation revealed that many countries were actively engaged in human experimentation. But an American scientist who frequently appears after the Second World War is the USA army captain Daniël Carleton Gajdusek.

He visited from 1948 till 1954 respectively, on behalf of the US army command post-war Germany, Czechoslovakia, Congo/Zaire, Finland, South Korea, Crimea, and the former Yugoslavia, while he was a staff member of the Institut Pasteur in Iran from 1952 to 1953.

Ebola Found In Doctor's Eye Months After Virus Left Blood

BY MARILYNN MARCHIONE

For the first time, Ebola has been discovered inside the eyes of a patient months after the virus was gone from his blood.

The new report concerns Dr. Ian Crozier, a 43-year-old American physician diagnosed with Ebola in September while working with the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone. Ebola has infected more than 26,000 people since December 2013 in West Africa. Some survivors have reported eye problems but how often they occur isn't known. The virus also is thought to be able to persist in semen for several months.

He was treated at Emory University Hospital's special Ebola unit in Atlanta and released in October when Ebola was no longer detected in his blood. Two months later, he developed an inflammation and very high blood pressure in one eye, which causes swelling and potentially serious vision problems.

Ebola: First Clinical Trial Of Vaccine Yields Positive Results

(pix: en-africatime)

An experimental Ebola vaccine tested on 20 volunteers appears to be safe and producing the immune response expected within four weeks of receiving the dose.

Half of the test group received a higher-dose shot, and those people produced more antibodies, says a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Some people also developed a different set of virus-fighting immune cells, named T cells, doctors found.

Research on monkeys had also noticed such a combination response, reports AP.

Calling it "a promising factor," Anthony Fauci, director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which led the vaccine work, said the response was comparable to what had produced protection in the animals.

The researchers reported no serious side effects other than high fever which subsided in a day. A booster shot may be needed, say experts, going by the results in monkey trials.

Sierra Leone: Ebola May Have Reached Peak - Official

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's 
temperature being taken by a Chinese soldier 

before the opening of a new Ebola virus clinic 

sponsored by China, in Monrovia, Liberia, 

Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2014 (pix: ibtimes)

The Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, which has been surging in recent weeks, may have reached its peak and could be on the verge of slowing down, Sierra Leone's information minister said Wednesday.

But in a reminder of how serious the situation is in Sierra Leone, a ninth doctor became infected Wednesday and the World Health Organization said the country accounted for more than half of the new cases in the hardest-hit countries in the past week. By contrast, infections appear to be either stabilizing or declining in Guinea and Liberia, where vigorous campaigning for a Senate election this week suggests the disease might be loosening its grip.

In all, 15,935 people have been sickened with Ebola in West Africa and other places it has occasionally popped up. Of those, 5,689 have died. The case total includes 600 new cases in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in just the past week, according to the WHO.

Gov Fashola, According To London Telegraph

Meet The Man Who Tamed Nigeria's Most Lawless City...

 By Colin Freeman

*Fashola 

He famously claims to be "just doing his job". But in a land where politicians are known for doing anything but, that alone has been enough to make Babatunde Fashola, boss of the vast Nigerian city of Lagos, a very popular man.

Confounding the image of Nigerian leaders as corrupt and incompetent, the 51-year-old governor has won near-celebrity status for transforming west Africa's biggest city, cleaing up its crime-ridden slums and declaring war on corrupt police and civil servants.

Next month, he will come to London to meet business leaders and Mayor Boris Johnson's officials, wooing investors with talk of how he has spent the last seven years building new transport hubs and gleaming business parks.

Yet arguably his biggest achievement in office took place just last week, and was done without a bulldozer in sight. That was when his country was officially declared free of Ebola, which first spread to Nigeriathree months ago when Patrick Sawyer, an infected Liberian diplomat, flew into Lagos airport.

Health officials had long feared that the outbreak, which has already claimed nearly 5,000 lives elsewhere in west Africa, would reach catastrophic proportions were it to spread through Lagos. One of the largest cities in the world, it is home to an estimated 17 million people, many of them living in sprawling shanty towns that would have become vast reservoirs for infection. To make matters worse, when the outbreak first happened, medics were on strike.

Instead, Mr Fashola turned a looming disaster into a public health and PR triumph. Breaking off from a trip overseas, he took personal charge of the operation to track down and quarantine nearly 1,000 people feared to have been infected since Mr Sawyer's arrival.

Last week, what would have been a formidably complex operation in any country came to a successful end, when the World Health Organisation announced that since Nigeria had had no new cases for six weeks, it was now officially rid of the virus.

"This is a spectacular success story," said Rui Gama Vaz, a WHO spokesman, who prompted an applause when he broke the news at a press conference in Nigeria on Tuesday. "It shows that Ebola can be contained."

READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE

Ebola: Liberian President Writes Very Touching Letter To The World

Dear World
In just over six months, Ebola has managed to bring my country to a standstill. We have lost over 2,000 Liberians. Some are children struck down in the prime of their youth. Some were fathers, mothers, brothers or best friends. Many were brave health workers that risked their lives to save others, or simply offer victims comfort in their final moments…

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf 

There is no coincidence Ebola has taken hold in three fragile states – Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea – all battling to overcome the effects of interconnected wars. In Liberia, our civil war ended only eleven years ago. It destroyed our public infrastructure, crushed our economy and led to an exodus of educated professionals. A country that had some 3,000 qualified doctors at the start of the war was dependent by its end on barely three dozen.

In the last few years, Liberia was bouncing back. We realized there was a long way to go, but the future was looking bright. Now Ebola threatens to erase that hard work. Our economy was set to be larger and stronger this year, offering more jobs to Liberians and raising living standards. Ebola is not just a health crisis – across West Africa, a generation of young people risk being lost to an economic catastrophe as harvests are missed, markets are shut and borders are closed.

Disease-Ravaged Africa- The Nigerian Scenario

By Moses Obroko

November 2030: 

Africa is facing a biological warfare from nature in the year 2030. The dreaded ebola virus has yet again surfaced; only this time in West Africa. It was in 1976 that it was first identified and named after a river in the country that used to be called Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo. Of course no one had really given any serious thought to developing a cure/vaccine for it in Africa as it usually breaks out at intervals every other few years. 54 years later, the virus having mutated into a stronger strain, has reared up its head once more; only this time with fatalistic global consequences.

The death toll from the virus is rising in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. Many countries along the West African coastline are already overrun by it with Benin Republic beginning to count its own fatalities.

And then it happened! Nigeria which had hitherto had been grappling with every other socio-economic and leadership issues known to mankind, got the virus. And the world noticed!

Nigeria has nearly 190,000,000 people who had been bedeviled by corrupt, inefficient leadership, having a rippling effect on their economic wellbeing. The people of Nigeria had always borne their poor socio-economic situation with the equanimity of the subjugated. One military dictator after another had instilled the fear of the ruling class in the masses. Robbed of any will power to challenge any government of the day, Nigerians always hoped and prayed to God to help them solve problems they already have the solutions to, but lacked the will power to do so. Nigerians can tolerate poverty, bad leadership and deprivations from the callousness of a wicked few.  This is because they can see and feel the problem. For instance, it is because there is no electricity, or the roads are bad or doctors are on strike and the hospitals are not well equipped; indeed the reasons are varied and countless for which Nigerians perfectly understand-and can stomach.