Disease

United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon with actor Leonardo DiCaprio during his designation ceremony as the UN Messenger of Peace. Photograph: EPA

Julian Borger - New York The Guardian
21 Sep 2014 16.55 BST

More than 140 heads of state and government fly in to New York this week for the United Nations general assembly amid apprehension that international order is unraveling at an accelerating pace, while the world's leaders seem ever less willing or able to deal with the proliferating threats.

The UN's humanitarian agencies are in danger of being completely overwhelmed by the multiple crises. Ebola is spreading rapidly across West Africa, swamping rickety national health systems and a thus-far underfunded UN effort to stop its advance. The spread of Islamic State (Isis) extremists in the Middle East, feeding on the destruction of the Syrian civil war and exposing the weakness of the Iraqi state, has similarly outpaced patchy international efforts at containment.

courier-journal.com/The Chigaco Tribune - Sep 22, 2014

Faced with a brutal and wily adversary, President Barack Obama on Tuesday ordered a scaled-up military assault. Not on terrorists in Syria, but Ebola in West Africa.

The president dispatched some 3,000 American troops to help build 17 treatment centers. The Pentagon will establish a military command center in Liberia to coordinate the civilian response to the epidemic. American military health experts will help train thousands of African health care workers. American aid workers will help distribute supplies and information to families there.

The U.S. — and, we hope, the rest of the world — is getting serious about confronting this plague blazing through Africa. The official Ebola toll as of late Tuesday: 4,985 cases and 2,461 deaths. Some experts, however, suspect the actual death tally is much higher. And the rate of Ebola infection is growing exponentially. The number of Ebola cases could spike to 20,000 in a matter of months.

theguardian.com - 22 September 2014

As health authorities attempt to halt the spread of Ebola in Liberia, many citizens are struggling to feed themselves. People who have lost members of their household to the virus are often confined to their homes for weeks, making it difficult to collect food and other essentials. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is distributing food to families in quarantine in 10 counties across Liberia

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2014/sep/22/life-under-ebola-quarantine-in-pictures

CBC News - Sep 22, 2014

Sierra Leone's three-day shutdown to try to contain an Ebola virus outbreak has ended, but it's unclear how much the effort helped.

About six million citizens in the West African country were asked to stay indoors until Sunday night as 30,000 health workers, volunteers and teachers went door to door to look for people who may be infected and to give out information about the disease.

The Ebola virus has infected an estimated 5,762 people since March and killed an 2,793 as of Sept. 18, according to the World Health Organization.

"There was massive awareness of the disease," Stephen Gaojia, head of the Ebola Emergency Operations Centre, said on Monday.

Authorities reached more than 80 per cent of the targeted households, he added.