United States

NEW YORK TIMES                                                                                         Nov. 16, 2014

EDITORIAL

Recent gains in controlling the Ebola epidemic in West Africa have been encouraging, but they offer no reason for complacency. In Liberia, the hardest-hit country, the rate of new infections has declined in some areas, and several treatment units have been reporting empty beds for more than a month. But in adjacent Sierra Leone the number of new cases has shot upward, while in Guinea, where the epidemic started, the incidence of new cases appears to have stabilized over all, with growth in some districts and declines in others. All told, Ebola has infected more than 14,000 people in West Africa and killed more than 5,000 of them...

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS                                                                               Nov. 15, 2014

By Sherry Jacobson

The “Ebola cluster” in Dallas County is the subject of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

...the report offers a detailed timeline of what happened, starting with Thomas Eric Duncan’s arrival in Dallas from Liberia on Sept. 20. His Ebola symptoms were misdiagnosed Sept. 25 at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas as sinusitis and he was sent home with antibiotics. He returned to the hospital Sept. 28, underwent 10 days of treatment and died Oct. 8.

Two of Duncan’s caretakers, both registered nurses, were also infected and were treated successfully for the disease. Protocols required public health workers to monitor 177 people who had contact with the three Ebola patients.

A dozen people in that group, however, were tested for Ebola after developing fever or other symptoms compatible with the disease during the monitoring period. None were found to have Ebola. By last Friday, all contacts had cleared 21 days of monitoring and the county’s outbreak was declared over.

USA TODAY                                                 Nov.13, 2014
By Michael Winter

A third Ebola patient is headed to the Nebraska Medical Center this weekend, according to news reports Thursday.

CBS News said the patient was a surgeon infected with the virus while treating victims in Sierra Leone, one of the hardest-hit areas of West Africa.

NBC News said the patient is a Sierra Leonean national who is a permanent resident of the United States...

The Biocontainment Unit at the University of Nebraska facility in Omaha has already successfully treated and released two others -- Dr. Rick Sacra, a missionary delivering babies in Liberia, and Ashoka Mukpo, an NBC News freelance cameraman who also became infected while working in Liberia.
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/13/ebola-nebraska-third-patient/18995987/

REUTERS                                                           Nov. 20,2014

Molecular diagnostics company Cepheid said it received a grant of up to $3.3 million, co-financed by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to develop a diagnostic test for the deadly Ebola virus.

The Xpert Ebola test, which is expected to use saliva or a drop of blood to identify the virus, is likely to be offered on an emergency use only basis, Cepheid said on Thursday.

Cepheid and the Gates Foundation are also evaluating deploying the company's RemoteXpert cloud-based monitoring software to help track the spread of the disease.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month granted emergency authorization to two new Ebola diagnostic tests made by BioFire, a subsidiary of medical diagnostics maker BioMerieux.