Conakry

 REUTERS                                                                                     Oct. 30, 2014

By Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) - Mandatory quarantines ordered by some U.S. states for doctors and nurses returning from West Africa's Ebola outbreak are creating a "chilling effect" on aid work there, the humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders said on Thursday.

Scientists know a lot about the virus that causes Ebola — but there are many puzzles that they have yet to solve.

NATURE SCIENCE International Weekly Journal of Science                                   Oct. 29, 2014

To much of the world, the virus behind the devastating Ebola outbreak in Africa seems to have stormed out of nowhere. But Leslie Lobel thinks we should have seen it coming.

In 2012, Lobel and a team of researchers spent six months in Uganda studying the Ebola virus and related viruses. Over the course of their stay, these pathogens caused at least four separate outbreaks of disease in central Africa, affecting more than 100 people. To Lobel, a virologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel, the outbreaks felt like the small tremors that can precede a major earthquake. “We all said, something is going on here; something big is going to happen,” he says.

THE NEW REPUBLIC                                                                      Oct. 29, 2014
ByJonathan Cohen
.... “An Ebola diagnosis need not be a death sentence,” Paul Farmer, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard, wrote in an influential essay for the London Review of Books. “If patients are promptly diagnosed and receive aggressive supportive care—including fluid resuscitation, electrolyte replacement and blood products—the great majority, as many as 90 percent should survive.”

The survival rate in West Africa has been a lot lower than 90 percent...

The Argus arrives with supplies and medical personnel to assist Serra Leone

 BBC                                                              Oct. 30, 2010

By AndrewHarding

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone--  A British Navy support ship ship has arrived in Sierra Leone to help deal with the deadly Ebola outbreak in the West African country.

Royal Fleet Auxiliary Argus is carrying food, medical equipment, three helicipeters and 32 pick-up trucks, to help keep hard-pressed Ebola treatment centres going.

Doctors, nurses and military personnel are also on board.

The BBC's Africa correspondent Andrew Harding said it would act as an offshore base for the aid effort. and described it as an "important moment".

Read complete story

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29836657