Africa

  USA TODAY                                                                                                               Nov. 16, 2014

 By Gregg Zoroya

MONROVIA, Liberia  -- The commander of U.S. troops in this West African nation is "cautiously optimistic" the war on Ebola is being won but says hard work remains to halt the spread of the deadly virus.

"People start to see the progress that's been made and they say, 'Well, Liberia is good to go,' " Maj. Gen. Gary Volesky told USA TODAY in a wide-ranging interview at his headquarters here. "(But) we've got 20 brand-new cases every single day, and we're going to continue to put our foot on the accelerator until we get this thing out of Liberia...."

 The persistent stream of new infections plaguing Liberia is largely occurring in rural areas that lack Ebola treatment centers the U.S. military is helping to build, Volesky said. "There's a lot of work left to do in Liberia."

In addition to building or supporting up to 17 new treatment centers, the U.S. military is training health care workers to staff them and is testing blood samples more rapidly for diagnoses.

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WASHINGTON POST                                                                                                Nov. 17, 2014

By Joel Achenbach

John Hoover, the U.S amabassador to Sierre Leone, .... noted that the response to the epidemic in Sierra Leone poses a management challenge, and he sees a need to “sharpen coordination.”

                                                           Ambassador John Hoover. (Courtesy of State Department)

“There are a great deal of players on the ground,” Hoover said in an interview from Freetown.  “Lots of people doing lots of things. It’s a question of sharpening that coordination so that we’re not missing gaps and not overlapping and tripping over one another.”

He sees progress in that battle in the eastern part of Sierra Leone, but the epidemic is flaring in the western part of the country. Sierra Leone is the country with the highest infection rate, according to the World Health Organization’s most recent update. About 70 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have deployed to Sierra Leone to fight Ebola. The U.S. military has focused on neighboring Liberia; Britain has a leading role in Sierra Leone....

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WASHINGTON POST                                                                                          Nov. 17, 2014

By Kevin Sieff

...The doctors who tended to him in Freetown appeared to be unaware that an early Ebola test — taken within the first three days of the illness — is often inconclusive. In a country where information about the disease continues to move slowly, it was another potentially tragic mistake.

In many cases, a negative test at that stage means nothing because “there aren’t enough copies of the virus in the blood for the test to pick up,” said Ermias Belay, the head of the CDC’s Ebola response team in Sierra Leone.

But M’Briwa and others treated the test as definitive, even though Salia remained feverish and weak. The first results were delivered by a team of Chinese lab technicians who had opened a nearby hospital. (The technicians declined Sunday to speak about Salia’s case.)...

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/a-doctors-mistaken-ebola-test-we-were-celebrating--then-everything-fell-apart/2014/11/16/946a84da-6dd5-11e4-a2c2-478179fd0489_story.html