UNMC dean who just returned from Sierra Leone, another Ebola expert agree: Fight not over

Dr. Ali Khan, who returned to Omaha late last week after a month in Sierra Leone, said progress is evident, but he cautioned officials there against becoming complacent. “Because with a disease like Ebola,” he said, “all you need is one case to restart an outbreak or a cluster of cases.”

Khan, the dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health, said that during his stint as a consultant for the World Health Organization, one Ebola-infected fisherman infected more than 30 people before dying.

WHO reported Wednesday that 116 new confirmed cases of Ebola virus disease were reported in Sierra Leone and Guinea during the week ending Sunday, compared with 132 the previous week. Liberia, WHO said, reported no new confirmed cases for the second consecutive week.

Still, the disease remains distributed across a large geographic region, said Dr. Gavin Macgregor-Skinner, global projects manager for the Elizabeth R. Griffin Foundation and an assistant professor at Penn State University.

Macgregor-Skinner was in Omaha as part of a daylong Ebola conference...  that drew researchers from across the U.S.

With the rainy season approaching in the three countries, Macgregor-Skinner said, people in remote areas who contract Ebola won’t be able to get to treatment centers, and health care workers won’t be able to reach them. The rainy season begins in mid-May and is most intense from July to September....