Friday, October 17, 2014

peter piot: outbreak out of hand, won't end without clipboards...,


guardian |  The Ebola epidemic, which is out of control in three countries and directly threatening 15 others, may not end until the world has a vaccine against the disease, according to one of the scientists who discovered the virus.

Professor Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it would not have been difficult to contain the outbreak if those on the ground and the UN had acted promptly earlier this year. “Something that is easy to control got completely out of hand,” said Piot, who was part of a team that identified the causes of the first outbreak of Ebola in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1976 and helped bring it to an end.

The scale of the epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea means that isolation, care and tracing and monitoring contacts, which have worked before, will not halt the spread. “It may be that we have to wait for a vaccine to stop the epidemic,” he said.

On Thursday night, a Downing Street spokesman said a meeting of the government’s emergency response committee, Cobra, was told the chief medical officer still believed the risk to the UK remained low.

“There was a discussion over the need for the international community to do much more to support the fight against the disease in the region,” the spokesman said. “This included greater coordination of the international effort, an increase in the amount of spending and more support for international workers who were, or who were considering, working in the region. The prime minister set out that he wanted to make progress on these issues at the European council next week.”

Dr Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in evidence to Congress, said he was confident the outbreak would be checked in the US, but stressed the need to halt the raging west African epidemic.

“There are no shortcuts in the control of Ebola and it is not easy to control it. To protect the United States we need to stop it at its source,” he said.

7 comments:

BigDonOne said...

Opening sentence of the Abstract above at least got one thing correct....

makheru bradley said...

Some folks not trusting the motives of Bill and Melinda.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14469

woodensplinter said...

Good thing for her that Ms. Kimberly doesn't open that muddle-headed drivel up for comments.

woodensplinter said...

Pompous posturing in Africa by unqualified empty suits is the root cause of the now uncontrollable outbreak in Africa, much as sustained pompous posturing by unqualified empty suits will be the root cause of the epidemic outbreak in the U.S. and Europe. The World Health Organisation has admitted mishandling the early stages of the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, saying it failed to recognise the risks of the disease in the fragile states of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

“Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall,” says a draft internal document obtained by the Associated Press. Experts should have realised that the conventional way of containing an Ebola outbreak would not work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems.

WHO’s appointment system in Africa is also criticised in the document. Heads of WHO country offices in Africa are “politically motivated appointments” made by the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr Luis Sambo, who does not answer to the agency’s chief in Geneva, Dr Margaret Chan, it said. As Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told the Guardian last week: “What should be [the] WHO’s strongest regional office because of the enormity of the health challenges, is actually the weakest technically, and full of political appointees.”

Medecins Sans Frontieres, whose volunteer doctors had begun to treat Ebola cases as soon as the outbreak was officially diagnosed in March – three months after the first case – had warned WHO in strong terms that this outbreak was different from previous ones.

“First of all it was the first time we had a case in a big city like Conakry [capital of Guinea]. It is something very different from the remote Congo jungle,” MSF’s Brice de le Vingne, director of operations in Brussels, told the Guardian. The cases were also in a triangle where three countries met. “We knew we were going to have a problem with dealing with three different administrations.” No country was going to want to declare an Ebola epidemic, because of the economic implications.

On 3 April, MSF first warned WHO, who responded by saying the numbers were still small. A dispute then broke out on social media between MSF and the WHO’s spokesman, who insisted it was all under control.

BigDonOne said...

No problem, we got yer back....

makheru bradley said...

Nigeria praises Bill & Melinda

[Nigeria is another success story. It had 20 cases and eight deaths after the virus was brought by a Liberian-American who flew from Liberia to Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital of 21 million people, in July. Nearly 900 people were potentially exposed to the virus by the traveler, who died, and the disease could have wreaked havoc in Africa's most populous nation. Instead, Ebola appears to have been beaten, in large part through aggressive tracking of Ebola contacts, with no new cases since Aug. 31.WHO, the U.N. health agency, called it "a piece of world-class epidemiological detective work." The organization is set to declare an end to the outbreak in Nigeria on Monday. Nigeria had a head start compared with other West African countries: Officials were able to use an emergency command center that had been built by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to combat polio.] http://apne.ws/ZwrmkO

BigDonOne said...

First Fuzzy runs for Wrong-Way Touchdown... http://www.infowars.com/the-great-fathers-ebola-solution-more-government-corruption/

Master Arbitrageur Nancy Pelosi Is At It Again....,

🇺🇸TUCKER: HOW DID NANCY PELOSI GET SO RICH? Tucker: "I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks ar...