Ebola deaths Figures published 8 January 2015 8,274 Deaths The World Health Organization (WHO) admits the figures are underestimates, given the difficulty collecting the data. WHO officials this week discovered scores of bodies. Source: WHO

Mission Unaccomplished: Containing Ebola in Africa

January 01, 2015 World Health Organization

Ebola's global reach

After Ebola, World Bank Chief Proposes Global Insurance Program For Future Outbreaks

World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim is proposing emerging nations, developed countries and global aid organizations participate in a kind of insurance system to help pay for health crises like West Africa's Ebola outbreak. “We need to prepare for future pandemics that could become far more deadly and infectious than we we have seen so far with Ebola,” Kim told an audience at Georgetown University on Tuesday. “We must learn the lessons from the Ebola outbreak because there is no doubt we will be faced with other pandemics in the years to come.”

The largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded has killed more than 8,700 people in West Africa, and will cost Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone billions in the short term. Experts say weak health infrastructure in these countries contributed to the large scale of the outbreak. Governments and charities from around the world have donated billions in aid, and the number of cases has recently started to decrease.

But according to Kim, the recent outbreak could be just the beginning. And world leaders need a plan.

He explained World Bank officials informally discussed the possibility of a “pandemic response facility” with the World Health Organization, United Nations and other international actors last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“This could work like insurance policies that people understand, like fire insurance,” Kim said. “The more that you are prepared for a fire, such as having several smoke detectors in your home, the lower the premium you pay.”

He said countries, companies and organizations could work together to prepare for future problems by developing stronger health system infrastructure, surveillance and fast-acting medical response teams. This would lower the “premium” they pay.

“That would benefit donors and others who would pay the premium, but the greatest benefit would be that market mechanisms would help us push improvements in our preparedness for epidemics,” he said.

While nothing is official yet, Kim said the World Bank may send proposals to world leaders in the next few months.

Modelling the spread of Ebola using air-transport networks

THE Ebola virus is not contagious through the air, but air travel has played its part in spreading it within west Africa and beyond. Dirk Brockmann, a specialist in complex networks at Humboldt University in Berlin, has used air-transport data to quantify the probabilities of an infected passenger who has boarded a plane in one of the three most affected countries—Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone—exiting the network at a specific airport around the world. For every 100 infected passengers embarking in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, 84 would normally disembark at another African airport. Three would arrive in Britain and France; only one in America.

Thursday 8 January 2015 09.12 GMT

Scientists have discovered a new class of antibiotic using a revolutionary procedure hailed as a game changer in the hunt for medicines to fight drug-resistant infections. The antibiotic, called teixobactin, kills a wide range of drug-resistant bacteria, including MRSA and bugs that cause TB and a host of other life-threatening infections.

It could become a powerful weapon in the battle against antimicrobial resistance, because it kills microbes by blocking their capacity to build their cell walls, making it extremely difficult for bacteria to evolve resistance.

“Teixobactin kills exceptionally well. It has the ability to rapidly clear infections,” said research leader Kim Lewis, director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in Boston, US.

The public health threat of resistance was highlighted last year in a World Health Organisation report that warned the world was entering a “post-antibiotic era”. The UK’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies, has put antibiotic resistance on the government’s national risk register, alongside terrorist attacks and pandemic flu, and warned that without new antibiotics, more people will die after routine operations in the next 20 years. In December, a report commissioned by David Cameron warned that failure to tackle drug-resistant infections will cost the global economy up to £64tn ($100tn) by 2050.

In studies on mice, the new antibiotic wiped out infections of Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae, which can cause life-threatening blood and lung infections. It was also effective against Enterococcus, which can infect the heart, prostate, urinary tract and abdomen.

Most antibiotics are isolated from bacteria or fungi that churn out lethal compounds to keep other microbes at bay. But scientists have checked only a tiny fraction of bugs for their ability to produce potential antibiotics because 99% cannot be grown in laboratories.

Lewis’s group found a way around the problem by developing a device called an iChip that cultures bacteria in their natural habitat. The device sandwiches the bugs between two permeable sheets. It is then pushed back into the ground where the microbes grow into colonies.

The researchers found that after two weeks in the ground, the microbial colonies had grown enough to run tests on them. To do this, they covered the top of the iChip with layers of pathogens. Bugs that produced natural antibiotics revealed themselves by killing the pathogens above them.

Working with a Massachusetts-based company, NovoBiotic, and researchers at the University of Bonn, Lewis’s group screened 10,000 soil bacteria for antibiotics and discovered 25 new compounds. Of these, teixobactin was the most promising.

Teixobactin’s ability to kill bugs is only part of the attraction of the compound. Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists describe how none of the bacteria treated with the antibiotic showed signs of developing resistance.

The reason for the drug’s apparent resilience was discovered by Tanja Schneider in Bonn. Most antibiotics target bacterial proteins, but bugs can become resistant by evolving new kinds of proteins. Teixobactin works differently. It launches a double attack on the building blocks of bacterial cell walls themselves. “That’s an Achilles’ heel for antibiotic attack,” Schneider said. “It would take so much energy for the cell to modify this, I think it’s unlikely resistance will appear this way.”

Though promising, Lewis said that years more work lie ahead before the drug could be available. Human clinical trials could begin within two years to check its safety and efficacy, but more development would follow that. At the moment the drug would have to be given as an injection, but an oral pill would be more attractive.

Another shortcoming of teixobactin is that it only works against bacteria that lack outer cell walls, known as Gram-positive bacteria, such as MRSA, Streptococcus and TB. It doesn’t work against Gram-negative bacteria, which include some of the most worrying antibiotic-resistant pathogens, such as Klebsiella, E. coli and Pseudomonas.

Despite these limitations, the discovery of the antibiotic, and the process used to grow previously ungrowable microbes, has raised hopes among researchers in the field.

“What most excites me is the tantalising prospect that this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. “It may be that we will find more, perhaps many more, antibiotics using these latest techniques.”

The model does not show the current, absolute risks of Ebola arriving in a country. It starts with the assumption that infected people are on the plane in the first place: the actual risks are therefore far lower. It also reflects a normal travel schedule, when in fact many countries and airlines have suspended or modified flights. But Mr Brockmann's work does underline two things. First, the risks of Ebola spreading are overwhelmingly focused in Africa itself. Second, if a Western country is truly intent on keeping Ebola out, it has to go further than banning direct flights from the worst-affected places and must also target global hubs. Airports in London and Paris play a big part in linking Sierra Leone and Guinea to the rest of the world. America’s single Ebola fatality may have disembarked in Dallas but the first leg of his journey from Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, was to Brussels.

Photo: AP Health workers load a suspected Ebola patient into the back of an ambulance in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Professors from three leading British universities say policies favoring international debt repayment over social spending contributed to the Ebola crisis by hampering health care in the three worst-hit West African countries. Conditions for loans from the International Monetary Fund prevented an effective response to the outbreak that has killed nearly 8,000 people, the academics allege in a report in The Lancet Global Health journal this month. Show more

Photo: APHealth workers load a suspected Ebola patient into the back of an ambulance in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Professors from three leading British universities say policies favoring international debt repayment over social spending contributed to the Ebola crisis by hampering health care in the three worst-hit West African countries. Conditions for loans from the International Monetary Fund prevented an effective response to the outbreak that has killed nearly 8,000 people, the academics allege in a report in The Lancet Global Health journal this month. Show more BERLIN (AP) — The World Health Organization says the number of reported Ebola deaths in West Africa has risen to 7,905.

The WHO says altogether some 20,206 cases of Ebola virus disease have been reported since the outbreak in December 2013. Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have been the hardest-hit countries in the epidemic.

An update released late Wednesday by the WHO says that new cases in Liberia have mostly declined in the past six weeks. In Sierra Leone, there are signs the increase of new cases has slowed, but the agency says "the country's west is now experiencing the most intense transmission of all the affected countries."

The situation of the epidemic in Guinea is fluctuating, with between 70 and 160 confirmed cases over the past 15 weeks.

Top UK doctor: Ebola screening should be improved Ebola epidemic Photo: AP Medical staff in protective clothing transport a healthcare worker diagnosed with the Ebola virus disease in a quarantine tent prior to her being transferred to the Royal Free Hospital in north London at Glasgow airport, Scotland, Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2014. A British health care worker who contracted the Ebola virus in West Africa has been transferred from Scotland to an isolation unit in London for specialist treatment. Show more Ebola epidemic Photo: APMedical staff in protective clothing transport a healthcare worker diagnosed with the Ebola virus disease in a quarantine tent prior to her being transferred to the Royal Free Hospital in north London at Glasgow airport, Scotland, Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2014. A British health care worker who contracted the Ebola virus in West Africa has been transferred from Scotland to an isolation unit in London for specialist treatment. Show more LONDON (AP) — Britain's Ebola screening procedures should be improved, the country's chief medical officer said Wednesday, after a nurse was cleared to fly hours before she was diagnosed with the disease.

Nurse Pauline Cafferkey flew from London to Glasgow on Sunday after returning from Sierra Leone. Her temperature was taken seven times at Heathrow Airport — once on arrival and six times after she told staff she thought she might have a fever.

Her temperature was found to be within the range defined as acceptable, and she was allowed to fly to Scotland. Cafferkey developed a fever Monday and is being treated in an isolation unit at a London hospital.

A doctor who flew back from Sierra Leone with Cafferkey, Martin Deahl, has criticized the Heathrow screening, saying there were too few staff and the medical workers were not segregated from other passengers.

Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies said that "the process does seem to have not been as good as we all want to see." But she said Cafferkey had not been showing symptoms and posed little risk to fellow passengers.

She said screening procedures for people returning from West Africa are being reviewed. Cafferkey is the first person diagnosed with Ebola on British soil. Doctors at the Royal Free Hospital in north London said she was being treated with an experimental antiviral drug and with plasma from a recovered patient containing Ebola-fighting antibodies.

Infectious diseases specialist Dr. Michael Jacobs said Cafferkey was sitting up and able to eat, read and talk to her family. He said the patient was in "a positive frame of mind," although "I'm sure this isn't how she intended to spend New Year's Eve."

Since an Ebola outbreak began in December 2013 in the West African country of Guinea, there have been about 20,200 cases and about 7,900 deaths, mostly in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, according to figures released Wednesday by the World Health Organization.

Health December 31, 2014 Top UK doctor: Ebola screening should be improved

LONDON (AP) — Britain's chief medical officer acknowledged Wednesday that Ebola screening procedures should be improved, after a nurse was cleared to fly hours before she was diagnosed with the disease.

Nurse Pauline Cafferkey flew from London to Glasgow on Sunday after returning from Sierra Leone. Her temperature was taken seven times at Heathrow Airport — once on arrival and six times after she told staff she thought she might have a fever.

Her temperature was found to be within the range defined as acceptable, and she was allowed to fly to Scotland. Cafferkey developed a fever Monday and is being treated in an isolation unit at a London hospital.

A doctor who flew back from Sierra Leone with Cafferkey, Martin Deahl, has criticized the Heathrow screening, saying there were too few staff and the medical workers were not segregated from other passengers.

Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies said that "the process does seem to have not been as good as we all want to see." But she said Cafferkey had not been showing symptoms and posed little risk to fellow passengers.

She said screening procedures for people returning from West Africa are being reviewed. Cafferkey is the first person diagnosed with Ebola on British soil. Since an Ebola outbreak began in December 2013 in the West African country of Guinea, there have been more than 20,000 cases and more than 7,800 deaths, mostly in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Taiwan reports suspected Ebola infection English.news.cn 2014-12-06 13:26:01 More TAIPEI, Dec. 6 (Xinhua) -- Taiwan's disease control authorities said on Saturday that a 19-year-old man is suspected of being infected with the Ebola virus.

The man has developed symptoms of vomiting and diarrhea since he returned from Nigeria, where he had contact with animals, the authorities said.

He is now isolated in a hospital in Kaohsiung City, southern Taiwan. Samples have been sent to Taipei for examination, and authorities will announce the result this afternoon.

The authorities called on people to stay calm and have a check-up after returning from West Africa.

Ebola death toll in West Africa becomeming 'unpalatable,' expert says

Health December 08, 2014

LONDON (AP) — As health officials struggle to contain the world's biggest-ever Ebola outbreak, their efforts are being complicated by another problem: bad data.

Having accurate numbers about an outbreak is essential not only to provide a realistic picture of the epidemic, but to determine effective control strategies. Dr. Bruce Aylward, who is leading the World Health Organization's Ebola response, said it's crucial to track every single Ebola patient in West Africa to stop the outbreak and that serious gaps remain in their data.

"As we move into the stage of hunting down the virus instead of just slowing the exponential growth, having good data is going to be at the heart of this," Aylward said. "We are not there yet and this is something we definitely need to fix."

"Decisions about prevention and treatment should be data-driven, but we really don't have the data," agreed Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.

A week ago, the World Health Organization insisted at a media briefing it had mostly met targets to isolate 70 percent of Ebola patients and bury 70 percent of victims safely in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. But two days later, WHO backtracked and said that data inconsistencies meant they really didn't know how many patients were being isolated. Then the U.N. health agency also conceded that many of the safe burials were of people not actually killed by Ebola.

Aylward said not knowing exactly how many Ebola patients there are in hotspots like western Sierra Leone means health officials might miss potential contacts who could unknowingly cause a surge of cases. Compared to other epidemics like malaria, which is more seasonal and can fade away without huge control efforts, ending the Ebola outbreak will require extraordinary attention to detail.

"This outbreak started with one case and it will end with one case," Aylward said. "If we can't get 100 percent of the contacts of cases, we will not be on track to shut it down. Unfortunately at the moment, the data right now is not enough for us to get to zero."

In West Africa, where health systems were already broken before Ebola struck, collecting data amid a raging outbreak has been challenging. "Suddenly you have all these different sources of data that have to be compiled" from different aid agencies, said Ray Ransom, a data expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The ability to actually collect information is a different challenge than responding to the outbreak, and the energy has been focused on the response."

He said local officials are good at tracking known or suspected Ebola cases and their contacts but not as reliable relaying that information to national authorities. The software built to track Ebola outbreaks was initially designed by the CDC to have one person entering data into a computer. That "was perfectly fine since the dawn of time up until" the outbreak exploded this summer, said Armand Sprecher, a public health specialist with Doctors Without Borders.

The CDC has redesigned the software so now multiple people can enter data, although that created new problems like possible duplication, Sprecher said. When the epidemic starts to taper off, health officials should have more time to find every Ebola case and their contacts. But they may find they have to re-establish trust with the community to do that.

"If people were calling in cases for months and no one was coming ... and then suddenly that's no longer a bottleneck, do people suddenly realize that and say, aha, if I call in today, it'll work this time?" asked Sprecher. "If you've lost the community, you don't get anywhere."

LONDON (AP) — As the biggest-ever outbreak of Ebola continues to ravage West Africa, here are a few key numbers to get a handle on the epidemic:

13,268 and 4,960: According to an update Friday from the World Health Organization, there have been 13,268 Ebola cases and 4,960 deaths since the first child died of the virus in December — but those figures include all probable, suspected and confirmed cases and are subject to change as more information becomes available. The numbers fluctuate as more data becomes available, and as probable and suspected cases are either discarded or confirmed.

Experts warn the actual number of cases and deaths are likely far higher than what's been reported, because people may be reluctant to seek care and officials are too overwhelmed with control efforts to record every single case. The vast majority of patients are in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Cases and deaths are typically only recorded days after people become symptomatic or die, which complicates a real-time understanding of Ebola. "We are definitely getting a delayed picture of the outbreak," said Sebastian Funk, a lecturer in infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "It's difficult to tell if we are reaching a turning point or if there will be a doomsday scenario. I could see it going either way at the moment."

4,707: According to WHO, 4,707 beds are needed across West Africa in Ebola treatment clinics; at the moment, just 22 percent of the necessary number are operational. The agency estimates a further 2,685 beds are needed for basic Ebola clinics where minimal treatment is provided and people are mostly isolated while waiting for test results. At the moment, just 4 percent of beds in these community clinics are available.

Given the uncertainty around case numbers, Funk says things like bed occupancy are a good sign of how the outbreak is evolving. "We really need to see numbers go down for several weeks to be confident it's a real trend," he said.

549: WHO reports that 549 health workers have been infected with Ebola, of whom 311 have died. Since Ebola is spread via contact with the bodily fluids of a patient, health workers are at high risk of catching the disease. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that no skin be showing in a health worker treating Ebola patients.

Eight: There are now eight countries that have reported Ebola detected on their soil: Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Spain and the U.S. Other countries like Britain, France and Germany have taken in people sickened by the deadly virus in West Africa but they have not reported any spread of the virus there.

Four: There have been four cases of Ebola diagnosed in the U.S. and a single death — Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who was the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the country, who later died at a Dallas hospital. Two cases were nurses who cared for Duncan. The fourth is a New York doctor who became sick a week after returning from West Africa.

Two: It took two months for Britain to build and open its first Ebola treatment center in Sierra Leone this week, an 80-bed facility with a dozen other beds reserved for infected health workers. The Kerry Town clinic, near the capital, Freetown, is the first of six centers to be built by the U.K. in Sierra Leone. It includes a triage center, ambulance pads, laboratory, pharmacies and decontamination units. In about the same time that it took to build the Ebola clinic, Sierra Leone has reported more than 3,500 cases of Ebola.

One: There is one remaining American hospitalized with Ebola, Dr. Craig Spencer in New York, a physician who worked for Doctors Without Borders in Guinea. He continues to show improvement, remains in isolation and is in stable condition.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced all travelers from the West African countries stricken with Ebola must travel to the U.S. through one of only five airports.

Travelers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea are being forced to travel through the five airports previously announced as Ebola screening centers for international travelers, officials said in a statement.

Those five airports are New York-JFK, Newark Liberty, Washington, D.C. Dulles, Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson and Chicago O'Hare.

All passengers taking flights from West Africa to these five airports will be subject to "secondary screening and added protocols, including having their temperature taken, before they can be admitted into the United States," officials said.

"We are working closely with the airlines to implement these restrictions with minimal travel disruption," said DHS secretary Jeh Johnson. "If not already handled by the airlines, the few impacted travelers should contact the airlines for rebooking, as needed."

There presently are no direct flights from those countries into the U.S.

It was also further announced that any passengers who have traveled into the country from West Africa during the preceding 21 days will also be screened for the deadly virus.

The restrictions come one month after Liberian national Thomas Duncan arrived in Dallas on September 20. He died October 8 from Ebola and two nurses have subsequently become infected.

"The Department of Homeland Security's policy to funnel all passengers arriving from Ebola hotspots to one of these five equipped airports is a good and effective step towards tightening the net and further protecting our citizens," said Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY).

This may be the first of many steps aimed at stemming the flow of infected people into the U.S.

"We are continually evaluating whether additional restrictions or added screening and precautionary measures are necessary to protect the American people and will act accordingly," said Johnson.

Growing concerns about a possible Ebola outbreak in Mali have at least one expert concerned many more people will die from the deadly disease than previously thought.

More than 5,100 people have died in West Africa from this year's outbreak across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Four have died from Ebola in recent weeks in Mali and authorities are scrambling to track down another 250 individuals for monitoring.

A further 14,413 are known to be infected, and the death toll among them is reaching 70 percent, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). This is the largest Ebola outbreak in history.

Those deaths are believed have been people infected by a Guinean imam who died in Mali of the disease, according to the WHO. But another outbreak in the country is raising fears that infections may be more widespread.

Many experts, including Jennifer Nuzzo, a leading infectious disease expert with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, sees the spread of Ebola to Mali as a potential "game changer" but is hopeful the outbreak can be quickly contained.

"I'd like to think it's not community-wide," Nuzzo told AOL News, "but it's not surprising to find more cases.

"Hopefully they can put a ring around them and extinguish the disease," she added.

Nuzzo contends there is reason to worry, but expressed hopes that efforts to contain the disease in Mali are as effective as in Nigeria.

A recent infection in Lagos, a teeming city of about six million people, was isolated and cured almost as quickly as a New York doctor who became in infected after returning from treating Ebola-stricken patients in Guinea.

"Everybody was really worried about Nigeria," said Nuzzo.

Experts have since instead been focusing their attention on Sierra Leone, where infections appeared to slow a bit before picking up again.

"Sierra Leone is doing far, far worse than it had in a long time," said Nuzzo.

The rising number of infections, combined with those already infected in Guinea and Liberia, mean it is going to be a long road to recovery, according to Nuzzo, who believes the death count could easily rise higher than previous prediction.

"I think its not going to be palatable," she said.

Previous Ebola outbreaks have been confined mostly to villages, but this one has hopped the borders of six countries, and Mali shares a 500-mile border with Guinea.

"The fact we're now seeing cases Mali, and Sierra Leone seems to be heating up, shows that we are in this for the long haul," said Nuzzo.

The desperation of people looking for a cure has led them down many a dark path, including the use of arsenic and snake venom, according to the Daily Mail.

Doctors Ortrud Lindemann, from Germany, and Richard Hiltner, from California, set off for Liberia recently to prove the two toxins would prove effective as homeopathic Ebola cures, according to the British newspaper.

Nuzzo slammed the idea, saying that there is virtually no way either could be effective treatments for the lethal disease.

"I don't know of any reason why those two things would work on a virus like Ebola," said Nuzzo. "It doesn't seem really feasible."

Both arsenic and snake venom are toxic to humans, even at small amounts of exposure, and U.S. authorities have worked for decades remove arsenic, which occurs naturally, from the nation's water supply.

"You're talking about arsenic ... a known poison, its pretty remarkable," said Nuzzo. "If the Ebola doesn't kill you, the arsenic will."

The only way to bring the deadly disease under control, according to Nuzzo, is to bring an Ebola vaccine to reality.

Clinical trials of a potential vaccine and other treatments still ongoing, it is not known how soon they can be approved by health officials.

The best way to at least slow the infection rate until then, says Nuzzo, is to not demonize with onerous mandatory quarantines the doctors returning from Africa after stints volunteering to help fight the disease.

"I worry that, what we are doing, it sounds like we're going to make it harder to stop the outbreak."

GENEVA: The World Health Organisation said on Wednesday (Nov 12) that 5,160 people have so far died of Ebola across eight countries, from a total 14,098 cases of infection.

The numbers supersede figures the UN health agency gave last Friday, when it reported 4,960 deaths and 13,268 cases.

WHO has acknowledged though that the number of deaths is likely far higher, given that the fatality rate in the current outbreak is known to be around 70 per cent.

The fresh toll, which runs through Nov 9, comes as the outbreak appeared to be spreading in Mali, with four Ebola cases, all of whom died, confirmed or suspected in that country.

The deadliest Ebola outbreak ever meanwhile continues to affect Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone the most. In its latest toll, the WHO said 2,836 deaths were recorded in Liberia, out of a total of 6,822 cases.

In Sierra Leone, 1,169 people had died from the virus out of 5,368 cases. In Guinea, there were 1,142 deaths from 1,878 cases. Data from Nigeria and Senegal remained unchanged, and both countries have been declared Ebola free. Nigeria had eight deaths and 20 cases, while Senegal had one case and no deaths.

In Mali, WHO reported three additional Ebola deaths, but said they were not linked to the only other case and death recorded in the country - that of a two-year-old girl from Guinea.

There has been one case of infection in Spain, where an infected nurse has recovered. In the United States, four Ebola cases have been recorded and one person - a Liberian - had died from the virus.

Ebola, one of the deadliest viruses known to man, is spread only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person showing symptoms such as fever or vomiting.

People caring for the sick or handling the bodies of people infected Ebola are therefore especially exposed. WHO said on Wednesday that a total of 564 healthcare workers were known to have contracted the virus, and 320 of them had died.

2014年11月06日 预防措施 预防措施: 卫生防护中心人员在演习期间，把可能沾上病人体液的床铺收集弃置。

上一则下一则 卫生署卫生防护中心今日在尖沙咀旅馆举行代号「托帕」的演习，模拟有旅客确诊感染伊波拉，测试当局的应变计划，找出需要改善之处。

演习期间，卫生防护中心派员到旅馆进行流行病学调查，确认可能的感染源头、相关接触者、被病人体液污染的地方和物件，食环署人员随即在房间和升降机大堂消毒。

是次演习旨在实地测试卫生署和食物环境卫生署人员在调查和消毒工作的协调，也让大厦管理处了解一旦有病人确诊感染时需要采取的措施。 2014年11月6日

有关埃博拉(伊波拉)病毒病的资讯

政府「埃博拉（伊波拉）病毒病准备及应变计划」下的戒备应变级别现正启动

埃博拉（伊波拉）病毒病

埃博拉（伊波拉）病毒病是由感染埃博拉（伊波拉）病毒所致。潜伏期为2至21天。病人可能出现突发性发烧、极度虚弱、肌肉疼痛、头痛和咽喉痛。随后会出现呕吐、腹泻、皮疹、肾脏和肝脏功能受损，在某些情况下更会出现内出血和外出血。人类感染的死亡率可高达90％。

埃博拉（伊波拉）病毒是通过密切接触受感染动物而传到人类。随后通过人际间传播，传播途径包括直接接触（通过破损皮肤或黏膜）感染者的血液、分泌物、器官或其他体液，以及间接接触受到这类体液污染的环境。

现时没有认可预防埃博拉（伊波拉）病毒病的疫苗。要预防感染疾病，游客必须要注意以下数点：

尽量避免到受影响地区旅游 注重个人和环境卫生；在接触眼、鼻及口前切记先以梘液或酒精搓手液清洁双手 避免密切接触发烧人士或病人，并避免接触患者的血液、体液和可能接触过患者血液或体液的物品 避免接触动物 食物须彻底煮熟才可进食；及 市民如从受影响地区返港，应留意返港后21日内的健康情况。如在这段时间出现埃博拉（伊波拉）病毒病的病征，应致电999并告知人员有关情况，以安排到急症室求诊

// 俄国新闻 / 卫生保健