Tag: west africa
Two Under Observation At Hospitals After Falling Ill During Flights From Liberia To O’Hare

Two Under Observation At Hospitals After Falling Ill During Flights From Liberia To O’Hare

Chicago Tribune

(MCT) — Two people who arrived at O’Hare International Airport from Liberia have been placed under observation at Chicago hospitals, under the city’s procedures for handling Ebola, after they fell ill during their flights, officials said.
Health officials stressed that “at this time there have been no confirmed cases of Ebola and there is no threat to the general public.”
In fact, the officials said they decided against testing the two for Ebola after initial medical evaluations but did send them to Lurie Children’s Hospital and Rush University Medical Center for observation. They are being kept in isolation.
The two hospitals are among four in Chicago that have agreed to take Ebola patients from other hospitals and health care providers should any cases appear in the area. The others are Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the University of Chicago Medical Center.
The child had vomited during a flight from Liberia to O’Hare, city health officials said. Upon landing, the child was screened by federal authorities and was found to have no other symptoms and no known risk of exposure. The child was taken to Lurie “out of an abundance of caution” and was undergoing observation in isolation.
Following city guidelines, the child’s family was under quarantine until the evaluation was completed.
The other passenger, an adult traveling alone from Liberia, reported nausea and diarrhea during another flight from Liberia. The passenger reported having been diagnosed with typhoid fever in August but had a normal temperature and reported no known risk of exposure to Ebola during a screening.
The person was taken to Rush for medical evaluation and observation, health officials said.
The city released no other details of the passengers or their flights.

AFP Photo/Jay Directo

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Passengers From Ebola-Stricken Countries To Use Five U.S. Airports

Passengers From Ebola-Stricken Countries To Use Five U.S. Airports

By Brian Bennett, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Passengers flying to the U.S. from three Ebola-stricken countries will have to fly into one of five designated American airports for additional screening, including having their temperature taken, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced Tuesday.

The restriction was immediately criticized by House Republicans who want a complete ban on travelers coming from West African countries with high Ebola infection rates.

Starting Wednesday, airline passengers coming from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea must fly into New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, Washington Dulles International Airport, or Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Johnson said.

Those airports already receive about 94 percent of travelers coming to the U.S. from the three West African countries. There are currently no direct flights from those countries into the U.S. About 150 passengers from West Africa arrive in the U.S. daily. Travelers not already flying into the designated airports will have to rebook flights, Johnson said.

At all land and seaports, immigration officers have been instructed to pull aside anyone who has traveled to Liberia, Sierra Leone, or Guinea in the previous 21 days. The Department of Homeland Security tracks airline manifests and other travel information of people who have traveled in West Africa.

The Obama administration could add more travel restrictions later, Johnson said.

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

But House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.) said the current restrictions fall short of what is needed to stop the virus from spreading in the U.S.

“The administration must do more to protect Americans,” Goodlatte said in a statement.

Goodlatte plans to introduce a resolution in the House in favor of blocking all foreign nationals from Ebola-stricken countries from entering the U.S. Obama administration officials and health experts have said that such a ban would make it harder to track people who may be carrying the virus because travelers would try to evade the ban by going overland into neighboring countries before flying overseas.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president has concluded for now that a travel ban would hurt, not help.

“Our views on the travel ban haven’t changed,” he said. “A travel ban would only serve to put the American people at greater risk …. Individuals who have spent time in West Africa would … conceal the true nature of their travel history.”

Intensive screening prior to air travel, and on arrival, are more effective, Earnest said. Still, he added that Obama wasn’t ruling out a travel ban at some point in the future if the situation calls for it.

“The president’s open to it,” Earnest said.

With the November midterm election approaching, increasing travel restrictions have become part of the campaign debate. A poll conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post this month showed that 67 percent of Americans surveyed said they would support “restricting entry to the United States by people who’ve been in affected countries.”

U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) praised the changes announced Tuesday, calling the airport restrictions “a good and effective step toward tightening the net and further protecting our citizens.”

Christi Parsons in Washington D.C. contributed to this report.

AFP Photo/Carl de Souza

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Liberia Welcomes UN Pledges On Ebola

Liberia Welcomes UN Pledges On Ebola

United Nations (United States) (AFP) – Liberia welcomed global pledges of action on the Ebola epidemic ravaging west Africa, admitting on Friday that the government was losing the trust of its people with the outbreak still out of control.

World leaders gathered at the United Nations on Thursday made fresh pledges of assistance in battling the growing crisis, while the Group of Seven nations vowed to keep open vital air and sea links with Ebola-hit countries.

“We are happy to hear that the entire world now understands the urgency of the reaction to threat of Ebola,” Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown told AFP.

“We hope that the commitment will be quickly followed by action because if this drags for long, the populations of the various countries will begin to lose patience and they will blame our governments.”

Health systems in the worst-hit countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea have been overwhelmed by the epidemic, which has killed 3,000 people, and are in dire need of doctors, nurses, medical equipment and supplies.

U.S. President Barack Obama led calls for a ramped up response, urging governments, businesses and international organizations to join the fight.

UN officials could not provide an immediate tally of the total pledges made at the UN meeting but the UN’s coordinator for Ebola, David Nabarro, said countries had “responded with generosity.”

Canada announced a contribution of $27 million dollars to the effort and France said it has set aside 70 million euros in a battle that the United Nations estimates will require close to one billion dollars.

The European Union said it would add 30 million euros to the current 150 million euros it has provided to fight Ebola.

But Obama warned: “We are not doing enough” — and UN officials said a 20-fold surge in assistance is needed to come to grips with an outbreak that has killed close to 3,000 people.

“Right now, everybody has the best of intentions, but people are not putting the kinds of resources necessary to put a stop to this epidemic,” he said, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Brown said Liberians were gradually losing trust in their government with the outbreak still out of control six months after the country announced its first case.

“We told our people that this was beyond the control of governments and that only international commitment could free us from this.

“This is a serious threat for our stability and as president Obama said, the world needs to react fast otherwise this will turn to serious security crisis.”

Sierra Leone took the drastic step on Thursday of putting another three of its 14 districts under quarantine, meaning, with two districts already locked down, more than a third of the population of six million can no longer move freely.

“My country is at the battlefront of one of the biggest life and death challenges facing the global human community,” Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma warned the UN by video link from Freetown.

A UN mission on Ebola set up last week is due to deploy in west Africa on Sunday, bringing supplies and equipment including protective suits, trucks, helicopters and other aircraft.

The United States is sending 3,000 troops to Liberia to help battle the contagion and has mobilized its experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help beat back the virus.

AFP Photo/ Carl de Souza

Ebola Cases To Explode Without Drastic Action: WHO

Ebola Cases To Explode Without Drastic Action: WHO

Geneva (AFP) — The Ebola epidemic is set to explode unless the response is radically intensified, the WHO said Tuesday, warning that hundreds of thousands could be infected by the end of the year.

The U.N. agency said in a report that new cases would surge from hundreds each week to thousands without “drastic improvements in control measures”, with the number of infections set to more than triple to 20,000 by November.

“We’ve rather modestly only extended the projections to November 2, but if you go to… January 2, you’re into hundreds of thousands,” said Christopher Dye, the head of strategy at the World Health Organization and a co-author of the study.

The research paper warns that the outbreak could drag out for years and become entrenched in west Africa, which has already seen almost 3,000 deaths.

The epidemic might simply “rumble on as it has for the last few months for the next few years,” Dye said, adding that “the fear is that Ebola will become more or less a permanent feature of the human population”.

Liberia, the hardest-hit nation, has seen 3,000 cases of Ebola and almost 1,600 deaths, with health workers turning people away from treatment units due to chronic shortages of beds and staff.

The country has some 150 foreign specialized medical workers on the ground but the U.N. has said they need at least 600, and health authorities are aiming to scale its current 400 Ebola beds up to around 2,000 within weeks.

Its response has been bolstered by a U.S. military mission, already being deployed, which will see 3,000 troops providing training and logistics.

– Threat of civil war –

But Antonio Vigilante, U.N. deputy special representative for recovery and governance in Liberia, likened the struggle to “trying to remedy an earthquake when it is happening”.

Liberia said Tuesday the slow international response risked allowing the country to slide back into civil war alongside neighboring Sierra Leone, and could reignite civil unrest in Guinea.

“The world cannot wait for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea to slip back into conflict, which could be the result of this slowness in response,” Information Minister Lewis Brown told AFP late Monday.

Sierra Leone, where more than 1,800 have been infected and nearly 600 have died, reported “an overflow of bodies” after a nationwide curfew helped uncover more than 200 new cases.

The WHO study, carried out with Imperial College London and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, forecast the number of cases would rise to around 6,000 in Guinea, 10,000 in Liberia and 5,000 in Sierra Leone by November 2 without action.

And it warned that the fatality rate in the current outbreak was likely more than 70 percent rather than the current estimate of one in two, based on recovery rates rather than cases where the outcome was still unknown.

“We are seeing exponential growth and we need to act now,” Dye said.

The United Nations is seeking to raise nearly $1 billion (778 million euros) to defeat the Ebola outbreak, the worst ever recorded, which the Security Council has declared a threat to world peace.

The U.N. has also produced a list of urgent “in kind” requirements, including helicopters, mobile laboratories, 3.3 million items of protective clothing and Ebola treatment centers.

– Weak health systems –

Ebola fever is one of the deadliest viruses known to man.

It can fell its victims within days, causing severe muscle pain, vomiting, diarrhea and — in many cases — unstoppable internal and external bleeding.

The current crisis, which quietly began in southern Guinea last December, has killed far more than all other known Ebola outbreaks combined.

Dye said that while the virus ravaging west Africa was spreading similarly to previous outbreaks, what has changed is the density and mobility of the affected populations.

Cultural practices like washing and touching dead bodies have compounded the problem, as has the very slow response in affected countries, which have never before seen the virus, and the international community, he said.

Weak health systems in the hardest-hit countries are also largely to blame, said Christl Donnelly, a professor of statistical epidemiology at the Imperial College and a co-author of the study.

“In Nigeria, for example, where health systems are stronger, the number of cases has so far been limited, despite the introduction of infection into the large cities of Lagos and Port Harcourt,” she said.

Ebola is only transmitted through contact with body fluids, so halting its spread is usually relatively simple.

Even in this epidemic, each Ebola patient on average infects only 1.7 people in Guinea, 1.8 in Liberia, and two in Sierra Leone, the study showed.

AFP Photo/Ed Jones

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