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Thread: 10 things you should know about Ebola

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    10 things you should know about Ebola

    #3 - "Don't have sex with apes, chimps, bats, turtles, porcupines or wilderbeasts". Didn't say anything about goats or sheep so ya'll from Texas need not worry.


    See the link for the entire list.

    http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-we...ow-about-ebola

    my junk is ugly

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    Ebola no longer a world health emergency...

    WHO: Ebola no longer world health emergency
    Mar 29,`16 -- The World Health Organization said Tuesday that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa no longer qualifies as an international health emergency, although it cautioned that male survivors can infect their sexual partners for up to a year after recovering.
    The decision by WHO's Ebola emergency committee comes following flare-ups that emerged in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone after authorities declared virus transmission over. The new cases sometimes were publicized only hours after the public announcements were made. "Complacency at this stage would be completely wrong," said Robert Steffen, the committee's vice chair.

    The announcement puts an end to the international emergency declaration that has been controversial. An Associated Press investigation found that WHO initially delayed making the declaration - similar to an SOS signal - on political, economic and religious grounds. Tuesday's announcement also comes as the organization fights the Zika virus that has prompted concern in the Americas. Steffen said the battle against Zika in no way dictated the committee's decision to declare the Ebola emergency over.


    Health workers prepare to collect the ashes of people that died due to the Ebola virus at a crematorium on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia. As Liberia marks the second anniversary Wednesday of its first confirmed Ebola cases, many neighbors say they want to see the crematorium torn down so they can try to forget that terrible time

    While there have been flare-ups of new cases, health authorities said Tuesday those were not linked to the original chains of transmission dating back to December 2013. "We know that little clusters will continue to flare up. That will be normal life just as in previous decades, there have been every now and then, outbreaks of Ebola in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa," Steffen said.

    More than 11,000 people have died mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone since December 2013. There are currently no known cases in Liberia or Sierra Leone, though Guinea recently reported two confirmed and three probable cases. Authorities are now monitoring nearly 1,000 contacts of the sick.

    http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...03-29-13-37-19

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    @Kurmugeon will be very unhappy
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    Ebola has many potential animal hosts...

    Ebola Virus Can Live in More Animals Than Once Thought
    June 10, 2016 - Ebola virus hotspots are more widespread across Africa and are carried by a greater number of animal species than previously suspected, according to a recent study published in the science journal Mammal Review.
    The study was led by scientists from the Center for International Forestry Research, also known as CIFOR, and other international universities. The report challenges the notion that the Ebola virus is mainly carried by three species of fruit bats. It found numerous potential animal carriers including rodents, primates, hoofed mammals, civets and shrews. “The most important aim of what we were doing was to see if we could understand better the factors that may be linked to the presence of the Ebola virus,” said Professor John Fa, one of the lead authors of the study and
    researcher for CIFOR and faculty member at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom.


    A woman has her temperature taken as part of Ebola prevention, prior to entering the Macauley government hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone

    The research was performed by scientists who looked at climates, types of forests, and animals that would likely be the hosts of the virus. “By doing the work that we have done, we were able to better map the areas which are favorable for the Ebola virus," he said. "And in so doing we can then start looking at these particular areas and hopefully come up with an early warning system that will say, 'Well, these areas are more likely to be the places where the disease might happen.'"

    Central and West Africa

    The study found that areas within Central Africa, such as the western part of the Congo basin, and West Africa are very favorable areas for the Ebola virus. “Tropical forest areas are the ones where the Ebola virus seems to like," Fa said. "That doesn’t mean that it can’t occur somewhere else at some particular point in time. What we’re saying is that given the information that we have, there is a very strong association between tropical rain forests and the Ebola virus." Science has proved the Ebola virus does require the body of an animal to survive. Without the animal host, the virus cannot reproduce and infect other animals.

    Many potential hosts

    Fa said the study found a wide variety of animals can be potential hosts. “The story that has been up to now is that there are only three possible species of mammals that may be the transmitters of the disease, and these are three fruit bats," he said. "We show in our study that we’ve got to be cautious about that because currently there isn’t sufficient evidence to clearly state that these three bats are the only ones responsible for the transmission of the virus." The wider range of animals flagged as potential carriers of the disease include more than 60 species of animals. Because of this, Fa said they have to look at the Ebola picture in a different way.

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    Still a year away...

    Successful Ebola vaccine will be fast-tracked for use
    Fri, 23 Dec 2016 - A high effective vaccine that protects against deadly Ebola virus could be available by 2018.
    Trials conducted in Guinea, one of the West African countries most affected by an outbreak of Ebola that ended this year, show it offers 100% protection. The vaccine is now being fast-tracked for regulatory approval. Manufacturer Merck has made 300,000 doses of the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine available for use should Ebola strike. GAVI, the global vaccine alliance, provided $5m for the stockpile.

    Results, published in The Lancet medical journal, show of nearly 6,000 people receiving the vaccine, all were free of the virus 10 days later. In a group of the same size not vaccinated, 23 later developed Ebola. Only one person who was vaccinated had a serious side effect that the researchers think was caused by the jab. This was a very high temperature and the patient recovered fully. It is not known how well the vaccine might work in children since this was not tested in the trial.


    Health workers wearing protective gear at the Nongo Ebola treatment centre in Conakry, Guinea

    Analysis - Tulip Mazumdar, Global Health Correspondent

    Ebola has been around for 40 years now. But it wasn't until the height of the 2014 outbreak in West Africa that the world decided to invest some serious money into finding treatments and cures. I watched as families of those who had become infected were isolated in their homes. Often entire neighbourhoods were quarantined behind orange fencing. That was their best chance of not becoming infected and infecting others. But as hundreds of people continued to die, and cases started being exported to Europe and the US - the world decided to act. Now, two years later, we have a vaccine. It usually takes around 10 years.

    There were some mild side effects reported in this trial, and the vaccine is only known to protect against one of the strains of Ebola, but it is the most deadly Zaire strain. Today's news is a very welcome and much needed breakthrough. However, as the WHO points out, more lives would be saved if countries invested in vaccines before outbreaks, rather during them. The director of British-based medical research institute the Wellcome Trust described the findings as "remarkable". "Had a vaccine been available earlier in the Ebola epidemic, thousands of lives might have been saved," Jeremy Farrar said. "We have to get ahead of the curve and make promising diagnostics, drugs and vaccines for diseases we know could be a threat in the future."

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    Ebola reappears in the Congo...
    Congo Faces New Ebola Outbreak
    May 13, 2017 - The World Health Organization says the Democratic Republic of the Congo is again facing an outbreak of the contagious and deadly Ebola virus.
    Congolese Health Minister Oly Ilunga announced Saturday that three people had died of the virus in the northeast of the country. Ilunga urged people not to panic and said officials had taken all necessary measures to respond to the outbreak. The World Health Organization said it was working with Congolese authorities to deploy health workers in the remote area where the three deaths occurred, all on April 22. Eleven other cases are suspected in the area.


    This undated colorized transmission of an electron micrograph file image made available by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows an Ebola virus virion. Health authorities are investigating suspected cases of Ebola in a remote northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

    WHO's regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, went to the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, on Friday to discuss disease response. The remoteness of the affected area, 1,300 kilometers from Kinshasa, means word of the outbreak was slow to emerge. WHO said specialist teams were expected to arrive in the area, known as the Likati health zone, within the next day or two. This was the first outbreak of the virus in DRC since 2014, when 49 people died of Ebola.

    Larger outbreak

    Experts say the 2014 DRC outbreak was not linked to a much larger outbreak that killed 11,000 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, beginning in 2013. They say active virus transmission for that outbreak was halted last year. In December 2016, The Lancet, a medical journal, published results of a WHO-led trial showing that the world's first Ebola vaccine provides substantial protection against the virus. Among more than 11,000 people who were vaccinated in the trial, no cases of Ebola virus disease occurred. Reports say the vaccine is now awaiting formal licensing clearance.

    Ebola, named for the Congolese river near where it was first identified in 1976, begins with a sudden fever, aching muscles, diarrhea and vomiting. It is a hemorrhagic fever, marked by spontaneous bleeding from internal organs and, in most cases, death. It can be transmitted by close contact with infected animals or people, usually through blood or other bodily fluids. People can contract the virus through direct contact with victims' bodies at funerals. Caretakers, nurses and doctors treating Ebola patients also are at high risk.

    http://www.voanews.com/a/congo-faces...k/3850841.html
    See also:

    WHO Confirms Second Ebola Case in Congo Outbreak
    May 14, 2017 - The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed on Sunday a second case of Ebola in Democratic Republic of Congo after an outbreak this week of 17 other suspected cases.
    Health officials are trying to trace 125 people thought to be linked to the cases identified in the remote northeastern province of Bas-Uele province in northeastern Congo near the border with Central African Republic, WHO's Congo spokesman Eugene Kabambi said. Three people have so far died among the 19 suspected and confirmed cases, he added.


    A health worker sprays a colleague with disinfectant during a training session for Congolese health workers to deal with Ebola virus in Kinshasa

    It was not immediately clear how the first victim, a deceased male, caught the virus, although past outbreaks have been linked to contact with infected bush meat such as apes. The outbreak comes just a year after the end of an epidemic in West Africa killed more than 11,300 people mostly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

    However, Congo, whose dense forests contain the River Ebola near where the disease was first detected in 1976, has experienced many outbreaks and has mostly succeeded in containing them without large-scale loss of life. The GAVI global vaccine alliance said on Friday some 300,000 emergency doses of an Ebola vaccine developed by Merck could be available in case of a large-scale outbreak and that it stood ready to support the Congo government on the matter.

    http://www.voanews.com/a/who-confirm...o/3851357.html
    Related:

    Study: Most Effective Measures Identified for Containing Ebola
    May 15, 2017 | WASHINGTON — A small outbreak of Ebola virus in Democratic Republic of the Congo is causing alarm among public health officials. A new study outlining containment strategies may help prevent an epidemic similar to the one that engulfed a number of western African countries two years ago.
    In the timely report, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers culled 37 studies for the most effective containment strategies. Pennsylvania State University biology professor Katriona Shea, co-author of the study, said, "The best strategy that we found out of the five that we looked at were funeral containment and public information campaigns [for the] sort of care in the community."


    People pass a banner reading "Stop Ebola," forming part of Sierra Leone's Ebola-free campaign in the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone

    Ebola virus is spread through coming into contact with the bodily fluids of infected individuals. Shea said investigators found the No. 1 way to prevent transmission was for loved ones to avoid washing bodies of the deceased prior to burial. Shea said that information is best conveyed through public health campaigns that also stress the importance of handwashing, personal hygiene and self-quarantine in high-transmission areas.

    Don't wait to get treatment

    People suspected of being infected with Ebola, the report found, should also not hesitate to go to the hospital or clinic for evaluation and treatment. But researchers concluded building more hospitals in response to an epidemic to be the least effective way to prevent spread of Ebola within communities. Shea said investigators undertook the study in response to the Ebola epidemic of 2014-2015, when 28,646 people became infected. Of these, 11,323 people died in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone died as of March 2016, according to the report.


    The Ebola virus treatment center in Paynesville, Liberia

    Forty cases of the disease were also reported in the DRC. Using the prevention strategies outlined in the study and the incidence data from the epidemic, researchers estimated that there would have been a reduction of 3,266 cases of Ebola and 1,633 lives saved.

    No consensus on containment

    At the height of the epidemic, Shea said there was no consensus on the best ways to contain the Ebola epidemic, and that's why researchers decided to look into the matter. "We really wanted to try to do something. Many of us have children, and were moved by stories, individual horrors and so forth," she said. "Others of us felt something we did scientifically might contribute to making the future outbreaks less horrific."

    There are now three confirmed Ebola deaths in a remote part of the DRC. Public health officials are reportedly investigating a total of nine suspicious cases of the deadly viral infection. With the virus once again threatening to become a public health menace, Shea said it's not too early to begin taking aggressive measures to prevent another Ebola epidemic.

    http://www.voanews.com/a/most-effect...a/3852382.html

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    Quote Originally Posted by Captain Obvious View Post
    @Kurmugeon will be very unhappy
    The ebolas are gonna get you!
    People who think a movie about plastic dolls is trying to turn their kids gay or trans are now officially known as

    Barbie Q’s

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    Question

    Can The New Ebola Vaccine Stop The Latest Outbreak?...

    Can The New Ebola Vaccine Stop The Latest Outbreak?
    May 15, 2018 • The Democratic Republic of Congo, with a suspected 19 deaths so far from the virus, is turning to an as-yet-unlicensed vaccine with a very promising track record.
    The Ebola vaccine has been two decades in the making, but it's only now being put to use in the face of a looming crisis. The virus has been spreading through a northern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since at least April there have been 2 confirmed cases and 39 more suspected ones. Nineteen people have died. In hopes of curbing the spread, global health officials are launching a vaccination campaign. Four thousand doses of the vaccine have been shipped to the DRC — with another 4,000 to follow soon. The World Health Organization is coordinating the vaccination effort.

    The vaccine – called rVSV-ZEBOV — was first tested in 2015 in the waning months of the massive Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Ira Longini, a biostatistician at the University of Florida who helped run that trial, notes that 7,500 people were given the vaccine. "Not a single person that was vaccinated got infected," he says. They did what's called a ring vaccination. For each infected person, officials locate everyone who was in close proximity. And then for each of those contacts, they locate everyone who was in close proximity to them. That's the ring. "Then all those people in the ring are vaccinated as quickly as possible," he says.


    A woman is vaccinated at a health center in Conakry, Guinea, during the clinical trials of a vaccine against the Ebola virus

    And it wasn't just that the vaccine was found 100 percent effective for those who received it. Even if everyone in the ring is not vaccinated, the trial showed a cut in overall transmission by about 75 percent. "That is a big deal," says Longini. "It's very unusual." But by the time these results came in, the outbreak in West Africa was basically over. And since then — apart from a few small flare-ups there hasn't been occasion to use the vaccine. Also it's still awaiting licensing. That takes a while. So governments need to give special permission for it to be used.

    Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, says the DRC has moved quickly to cut through the paperwork. "This time around the approvals have been done very fast," he says. That's because of some worrisome signs about this outbreak. On the one hand, like many previous outbreaks in the DRC, this one is in a hard to reach area, suggesting the risk of spread is low. "We are talking about a remote area of small villages with no paved roads," says Jasarevic. "But," he adds "it is on the shore of the river where there is important transport" that leads to a much larger regional city. "We are taking this very seriously because there is an important level of risk of virus going elsewhere other than this remote part of the country." Merck, which produces the vaccine, will be donating it. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the British-based charity the Wellcome Trust, and the British government have jointly contributed $4 million to carry out the campaign.

    https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsan...atest-outbreak

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    Bats now carry ebola...

    New Ebola species is reported for first time in a decade
    Jul 28, 2018 - The family of Ebola viruses has just gotten a bit bigger.[/i]
    The government of Sierra Leone has announced that a new species of Ebola, the sixth, has been discovered there in bats. It has been called, provisionally, the Bombali virus, after a district in the north of the country where it was found. There’s no evidence the new virus has infected people, although EcoHealth Alliance, an environmental nonprofit group involved in the discovery, said on Twitter that it has the potential to infect human cells. The discovery was made by scientists from the University of California at Davis and Columbia University as part of a U.S.-funded effort to find unknown viruses that have the potential to cause outbreaks in people. “It is really interesting. I think it’s exciting. But I think we have a lot of work to do to really understand if it is a pathogen and whether it does or doesn’t pose a threat,” Tracey Goldstein, of the One Health Institute at UC Davis, told STAT on Friday.


    Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, said a scientific paper detailing the discovery is in the publication pipeline. Some journal forbid public discussion of work they are considering publishing and Goldstein would not say anything about where and when the work would be published. The normal process for announcing the discovery of a new virus is through a peer-reviewed journal, where the scientists making the claim lay out details of how they found the virus — or in this case, genetic evidence of a virus — and the work they did to prove that it was new, and not simply a new strain of an already known pathogen. However, Sierra Leone, which had been notified of the discovery, wanted to first make the announcement to local press on Thursday. “They want to preempt negative rumors, and are rolling out education programs to reduce potential for spillover,” Daszak said.



    Doctors help each other with their protective suits during an Ebola virus drill at the Doctor Ramon de Lara hospital in the Dominican Air Force base at Santo Domingo


    Goldstein said the virus was discovered in two types of bats of the Molossid family, Angolan free-tailed bats and Little free-tailed bats. These two species of bats roost together, Goldstein said. They are found widely across sub-Saharan Africa. The infected bats were found roosting in people’s homes, she reported in ProMED, an online infectious disease reporting system. The scientists did not try to extract live viruses from samples taken from the bats, Goldstein said. Viral fragments – RNA – were detected; there was enough material to sequence “an almost complete genome,” Daszak said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have received samples from bats that tested positive for the Bombali virus.


    Stuart Nichol, chief of the viral special pathogens branch, said the CDC scientists will try to see if they can extract a whole infectious virus from oral and rectal swabs taken from the bats. Nichol said it’s clear from the genetic sequence of the Bombali virus that it is sufficiently different from other types of ebolaviruses to qualify as a separate species. Whether the virus is dangerous to humans isn’t currently known. The scientists who discovered it made a copy of the main protein on the exterior of the virus — using the genetic code as the recipe, Nichol said. They put that protein on what’s called a pseudovirus, a benign synthetic virus-like entity that is used in research. The pseudovirus bearing the Bombali virus protein was able to infect human cells, he said. But you cannot conclude from that that the Bombali virus would sicken people. “Just because it enters human cells doesn’t mean it will cause human disease,” Nichol said.


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    Deadly Ebola Outbreak Confirmed in Eastern DRC...

    Deadly Ebola Outbreak Confirmed in Eastern DRCAugust 01, 2018 - Four cases of the Ebola virus have been confirmed in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, officials confirmed Wednesday.

    ​​
    Julien Paluku, governor of North Kivu province, announced the outbreak on Twitter, just a week after Congolese and U.N. health officials announced the end of a separate outbreak that killed 33 people in the country’s northwest. There is no evidence yet suggesting the two outbreaks in the Congo are linked. “Although we did not expect to face a tenth epidemic so early, the detection of the virus is an indicator of the proper functioning of the surveillance system,” said the country’s health minister, Oly Ilunga Kalenga, in a statement.


    Ebola was first identified in the Congo in 1976. A highly infective virus, it can be spread via contact with animals or the bodily fluids of the infected — including the dead. The health ministry said there were 26 cases of hemorrhagic fever in the North Kivu province, including 20 deaths. Six samples from these patients were tested, and four tested positive for Ebola, the ministry said.



    Health care workers wear virus protective gear at a treatment center in Bikoro Democratic Republic of Congo



    Officials have said they now feel better prepared for Ebola outbreaks, in sharp contrast to the 2014 epidemic of the virus, which killed more than 11,000 people, mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.


    To contain the most recent outbreak, health workers distributed an experimental but effective vaccine to anyone who had come into contact with those infected. "We had a vaccine — and that I think is going to be extremely important for the future of Ebola control," Peter Salama, deputy director-general of emergency preparedness and response at the World Health Organization, told CNN of the July outbreak.




    Experts from the health ministry will arrive in the region on Thursday to coordinate a response to the virus, the ministry said.


    https://www.voanews.com/a/congo-decl...e/4509109.html

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