United States

Health Body to Consider Rapid-Response Teams, Other Changes

WALL STREET JOURNAL by Betsy McKay in Atlanta and Peter Wonacott in Freetown, Sierra Leone             Dec. 30, 2014

The tepid initial response to West Africa’s Ebola outbreak exposed holes in the global health system so gaping it has prompted the World Health Organization to consider steps to prevent a repeat, including emergency-response teams and a fund for public-health crises.

In a special session next month in Geneva, the WHO’s executive board is expected to consider those and other recommendations by its member countries—including a proposal that it commission an outside review of its Ebola response—according to a document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The plan comes as global health officials are struggling with a knotty question: how the WHO could have moved at a slow pace initially despite lessons learned more than a decade ago from another deadly outbreak, of SARS.

Read complete story.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/after-slow-ebola-response-who-seeks-to-avoid-repeat-1419892712

In-Depth report on lessons to be learned from the Ebola crisis

THE WASHINGTON POST by By Lena H. Sun, Brady Dennis and Joel Achenbach                            Dec. 29, 2014

A year after it began, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa continues to be unpredictable, forcing governments and aid groups to improvise strategies as they chase a virus that is unencumbered by borders or bureaucracy.

The people fighting Ebola are coming up with lists of lessons learned — not only for the current battle, which has killed more than 7,500 people and is far from over, but also for future outbreaks of deadly contagions.

Alice Jallabah, head of a bushmeat seller group, holds dried bushmeat in Monrovia. (Zoom Dosso/AFP/Getty Images)

HUFFINGTON POST   by  Jenifer Bendery

 WASHINGTON -- White House Ebola czar Ron Klain warned Sunday that the virus is still a global threat and will continue to be until it is completely wiped out.

This won't be done until we get all the way to zero," Klain said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "It's like a forest fire. A few embers burning and the thing can re-ignite at any time."

He said the United States has made "significant strides" to prepare for the occasional case of Ebola, but West Africa is still struggling with its outbreak. While Liberia has reduced new cases of Ebola from 50 to 100 a day to five to 10 a day, Sierra Leone and Guinea aren't having the same success.

"We're nearing a pivot point in this," Klain said.

Read complete story.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/28/ebola-ron-klain_n_6387194.html

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS  by Sue Ambrose                                     Dec. 27, 2014

DALLAS, Texas --When Ebola surfaced in the U.S., federal guidelines to protect medical workers here were weaker than the ones that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had in place 15 years earlier, The Dallas Morning News has found.

It’s not known exactly how nurse Nina Pham contracted Ebola while caring for patient Thomas Eric Duncan. Shown here at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, she was later successfully treated at a National Institutes of Health hospital in Maryland. Agence France-Presse

A review of CDC documents and archived Web pages shows that a 1998 protocol originally written for health care workers in Africa had more protective measures than the one for U.S. caregivers when Thomas Eric Duncan became the first patient diagnosed with Ebola in this country.

Two Dallas nurses were infected with the deadly virus while treating Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, where he died in early October....