You are here

Europe

Ukraine health officials fear big polio outbreak

Many young Ukrainian children are not vaccinated

Image: Many young Ukrainian children are not vaccinated

bbc.co.uk - September 22nd, 2015

Health officials in Ukraine are gripped by fears of a major polio outbreak, after it was announced this month that the disease had paralysed two children in the south-western region of Trans-Carpathia.

Concerns that the virus could cut a deadly swathe through the country has mobilised officials to launch a national immunisation campaign that would embrace all children up to 10 years old.

The threat has also mobilised international organizations, as well as Bill Gates, whose foundation promotes increased vaccinations worldwide and who spoke to President Petro Poroshenko about the polio danger last week.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Country / Region Tags: 
General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Budapest Migrant Standoff Enters Second Night

         

Hundreds of families have set up camp underneath Budapest's eastern station

Hundreds of migrants are in a standoff with police for a second night outside a Budapest railway station.

bbc.com - September 2, 2015

Earlier, scuffles broke out between the two sides as frustration among migrants boiled over outside Keleti station.

Many of the migrants have tickets and are insisting they be allowed to travel on to Germany and other countries, but Hungary says it is enforcing EU rules.

Meanwhile, Germany, Italy and France have called for "fair distribution" of refugees throughout the EU.

In a joint declaration, the country's three foreign ministers also called for Europe's asylum laws to be revised, the Italian foreign ministry said in a statement (in Italian).

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Country / Region Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

The World’s Most Dangerous Volcano May Kill Another City

Vesuvius and the surrounding Naples metropolitan area. Seen on July 28, 2015. Copernicus Sentinel data (2015)/ESA

Image: Vesuvius and the surrounding Naples metropolitan area. Seen on July 28, 2015. Copernicus Sentinel data (2015)/ESA

wired.com - July 29th, 2015 - Erik Klemetti

If you are a volcanologist, nothing strikes fear into your heart as much as thinking about the next Vesuvius eruption. This Italian giant is nestled in the sprawling metropolitan area of Naples, population 3.1 million. We’re not talking “nearby” like Rainier is to Seattle or Popocatépetl to Mexico City.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Country / Region Tags: 
General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Readability of Ebola Information on Websites of Public Health Agencies, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Europe

CDC IED JOURNAL  by    Enrique Castro-Sánchez , Elpiniki Spanoudakis, and Alison H. Holmes    Volume 21, Number 7- July 2015                                          

 Public involvement in efforts to control the current Ebola virus disease epidemic requires understandable information. We reviewed the readability of Ebola information from public health agencies in non–Ebola-affected areas. A substantial proportion of citizens would have difficulty understanding existing information, which would potentially hinder effective health-seeking behaviors....

Several factors, including readability of information provided (8), can help reduce health literacy deficits...It is recommended that health information materials should be written at a level typically understandable by an 11-year-old person ... anxiety or panic attributed to a highly virulent infection, such as Ebola, might hinder comprehension of related information (11).

Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

A Chinese Ebola Drug Raises Hopes, and Rancor

NEW YORK TIMES   by Sheri Fink, MD                                                      June 12, 2015   

After a nurse who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone was discharged Wednesday from a Rome hospital, a doctor there described the experimental treatments the patient had received as “absolutely miraculous.”

The lab at Beijing Mabworks, which developed the experimental drug, MIL77, used to treat Ebola. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times

General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Italian nurse cured of Ebola

AFP                                                                                                June 10, 2015

Rome -- An Italian nurse who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone with medical charity Emergency has been cured and left hospital on Wednesday, the health ministry announced.

Stefano Marongiu, a male nurse from Sardinia, has spent the last month receiving treatment at the Spallanzani infectious diseases clinic in Rome.

He was the second Italian to contract the disease after Fabrizio Pulvirenti, a Sicilian doctor who had also worked for Emergency in Sierra Leone.

The doctor, who left hospital in January, was treated at the same clinic with a combination of experimental drugs and the blood plasma of an Ebola survivor.

read complete story
http://news.yahoo.com/italian-nurse-cured-ebola-130902382.html

Country / Region Tags: 
General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

G7 states vow to wipe out Ebola but offer little concrete action

REUTERS                                                      June 8, 2015

KRUEN, Germany - Leaders of the Group of Seven industrial nations pledged on Monday to wipe out Ebola but offered little in terms of concrete action, disappointing non-governmental organisations.

G7 leaders said in a communique at the end of a two-day summit in the Bavarian Alps that they would offer help to at least 60 nations, including in West Africa, over the next five years to help prevent outbreaks from turning into epidemics.

More than 11,000 people have died in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa since the first reported case in March 2014. The G7 said the crisis showed it was necessary to enhance the world's ability to prevent, detect and respond to such emergencies.

The G7 nations said they would work together to combat future epidemics and boost or establish strategies to quickly deploy teams of experts with a variety of skills via a common platform, but their communique was thin on detail.

Florian Westphal, General Director of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Germany, said the leaders had done little to ensure epidemics would not spiral out of control in future....

Red complete story.

Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Stopping the next pandemic today

OP-ED  WASHINGTON POST,  June 7, 2015

By Ron Klain, the  White House Ebola response coordinator from October 2014 to February.

....To the extent there is discussion of improving the international response to epidemics, the focus has been on the need to reform the World Health Organization. Such reforms are badly needed, but even a fully effective WHO will not close the most gaping holes in the world’s epidemic response system. Even if the WHO did a better job of recognizing outbreaks that pose a risk of epidemic and alerting the world that action is needed, it does not have the substantial response function needed to combat such an epidemic. Recent discussions about creating a WHO response function — assuming that the agency could be trusted to manage it — rely largely on overburdened and underfunded nongovernmental organizations to staff a response. Thus, any new WHO response capacity will lack military-style mobile hospitals ready to be deployed; battalions of medical personnel with accompanying security support to isolate and treat the infectious and the ill; or a medical airlift capacity to move patients to places where they can get help...

Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Drowned Migrants and ‘a Failure of Compassion’

      

As many as 950 migrants are feared dead after their boat capsized in the Mediterranean. Children are carried by rescue workers as migrants arrive via boat at the Sicilian harbour of Pozzallo

reuters.com - by Mike Corones - April 21, 2015

Already, this week’s migrant deaths in the Mediterranean are hard to tally.

As many as 900 refugees died in a shipwreck off of Libya on Sunday, the day before two other boats carrying 400 people faced distress off of Libya and three migrants died when yet another boat ran aground in Greece. As this Reuters graphic shows, the vast majority of illegal border crossings over the Mediterranean happen via central and eastern sea routes, a fact reflected in this week’s disasters.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Country / Region Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Ebola: Moving from emergency to recovery

DEVEX   by Richard Jones                                                         March 17, 2015

(scroll down for link to EU statement.)

As the death toll from Ebola now tops 10,000 in West Africa, donors and aid implementers are figuring out how to best transition from the emergency to the recovery phase of the crisis.

Top EU and U.N. officials, leaders of Ebola-affected nations and representatives from the African Union, nongovernmental organizations, the private sector and the scientific community met in Brussels, Belgium, earlier this month to make progress on this goal. They agreed to embark on the design of a road map to help the economies of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia get back on track, starting with the priority task of rebuilding health systems.

But that, of course, will be no easy feat.

“We are at a really crucial stage of the real fight against Ebola, because this is a turning point when the emergency stage or the emergency response or medical response to Ebola containment is now turning into coordinating and structuring the long-term recovery program,” European Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development Neven Mimica said in an exclusive interview with Devex at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels.

Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Pages

Subscribe to Europe
howdy folks