Global Health

REUTERS
By Joe Page                              Oct. 31, 2014

(FORT PAGE, Maine)  Declaring Ebola fears in the United States "not entirely rational," a judge rejected Maine's bid for a quarantine on a nurse who treated victims of the disease in West Africa but tested negative for it, and instead imposed limited restrictions.

Nurse Kaci Hickox (L) joined by her boyfriend Ted Wilbur speak with the media outside of their home in Fort Kent, Maine October 31, 2014.Credit: Reuters/Joel Page

Nurse Kaci Hickox's challenge of the Maine quarantine became a key battleground for the dispute between officials in some U.S. states who have imposed strict quarantines on health workers returning from three Ebola-ravaged West African countries and the federal government, which opposes such measures.

Maine Governor Paul LePage said that while he was disappointed by the order from Charles LaVerdiere, the chief judge of Maine District Court, the New England state would abide by it.

Hickox, 33, said she was pleased with the ruling and said people need to "overcome the fear."

 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...