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Showing posts with label Liberia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberia. Show all posts

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Cuomo and Christie Order Strict Ebola Quarantines

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com



The governors of New York and New Jersey on Friday ordered quarantines for all people entering the country through two area airports if they had direct contact with Ebola patients in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The announcement signaled an immediate shift in mood, since public officials had gone to great lengths to ease public anxiety after a New York City doctor received a diagnosis of Ebola on Thursday.
A few hours later, New Jersey health officials said a nurse who had recently worked with Ebola patients in Africa and landed in Newark on Friday had developed a fever and was being placed in isolation at a hospital. The nurse, who was not identified, had been quarantined earlier in the day under the new policy, even before she had symptoms. Officials did not know Friday night whether or not she had the virus.
The new measures go beyond what federal guidelines require and what infectious disease experts recommend. They were also taken without consulting the city’s health department, according to a senior city official.


But both governors, Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey, portrayed them as a necessary step. “A voluntary Ebola quarantine is not enough,” Mr. Cuomo said. “This is too serious a public health situation.”
In New York City, disease investigators continued their search for anyone who had come into contact with the city’s first Ebola patient, Dr. Craig Spencer, since Tuesday morning. Three people who...
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Monday, August 18, 2014

3 Liberian Health Workers With Ebola Receive Scarce Drug After Appeals to U.S.

Three Liberian health care workers who have contracted Ebola received an extremely scarce experimental serum on Friday at a hospital outside the national capital, Monrovia, a Liberian health official said Saturday.
The official, Tolbert G. Nyenswah, an assistant minister of health and social welfare, would not say if any of the three were doctors.
The drug, a mix of monoclonal antibodies called ZMapp, has been tested in animals, but has not been studied for safety or effectiveness in humans. It arrived in Liberia on Wednesday after appeals by leaders there to top officials in the United States and a letter from President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia to President Obama.
Mapp Biopharmaceutical of San Diego, which provided the drug, said the “available supply of ZMapp has been exhausted.”
Mr. Nyenswah, who picked up the drug when it arrived at the airport and took part in a meeting to discuss which patients should be selected, said the three recipients had signed consent forms stating that they understood the risks and released all parties involved from liability.
He said he did not know how the patients were doing since receiving the drug.
If the treatment works, Mr. Nyenswah said in an interview earlier in the week, “and we can save the doctors here, especially those senior medical doctors that are infected with the virus, then Liberia can be a place to do a mass trial with the drugs.”



Liberian health officials requested the serum after it was...
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[Click here to read the US CDC Current Update of Ebola]

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Ebola Virus Disease Confirmed in a Traveler to Nigeria, Two U.S. Healthcare Workers in Liberia

Viral exposure in the workplace could have fatal consequences. This Health Advisory is shared from cdc.gov.
Nigerian health authorities have confirmed a diagnosis of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in a patient who died on Friday in a hospital in Lagos, Nigeria, after traveling from Liberia on July 20, 2014. The report marks the first Ebola case in Nigeria linked to the current outbreak in the West African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Health authorities also reported this weekend that two U.S. citizens working in a hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, have confirmed Ebola virus infection. These recent cases, together with the continued increase in the number of Ebola cases in West Africa, underscore the potential for travel-associated spread of the disease and the risks of EVD to healthcare workers. While the possibility of infected persons entering the U.S. remains low, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises that healthcare providers in the U.S. should consider EVD in the differential diagnosis of febrile illness, with compatible symptoms, in any person with recent (within 21 days) travel history in the affected countries and consider isolation of those patients meeting these criteria, pending diagnostic testing.

Background

CDC is working with the World Health Organization (WHO), the ministries of health of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, and other international organizations in response to an outbreak of EVD in West Africa, which was...
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Friday, July 18, 2014

Healthcare workers killed by Ebola’s worst outbreak ever

The global trade union federation Public Services International condemns the preventable deaths of dozens of healthcare workers, killed on the job by Ebola because they did not have the necessary tools and equipment.
The current Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone is the worst ever and the first to spill widely across several countries.  Ebola has no cure, but can be diagnosed and treated. Treatment requires intensive care and close contact between the patient and the healthcare worker.
Treatment can save lives, but should not kill healthcare workers!
It is a tragic reminder to national and international authorities that basic public health requires adequate investment both in healthcare workers and in health infrastructure to fight disease outbreaks of this kind.
Rosa Pavanelli, PSI General Secretary, warned: “We cannot accept pitiful excuses, whether from health ministers or donor agencies.  Health workers must have the tools to do their jobs.  All whose work brings them in contact with Ebola victims must have the protective gear.  Our members are dying because of unsafe working conditions, this is criminal neglect.”
The chair of PSI’s West African Health Sector Unions’ Network (WAHSUN), Dr Ayuba Wabba said: “We demand that Ministries of Health, the World Health Organization and the West African Health Organization:
  • Implement best practice guidelines for Ebola for all health facilities, including full...
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