A doctor with the Christian humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse has been confirmed as a victim of the Ebola virus.
Dr. Kent Branley has been heading up one of the relief and treatment centers hosted by Samaritan’s Purse since last October. He had been in Liberia with his wife and children, who have since been evacuated to the United States.
“Samaritan’s Purse is committed to doing everything possible to help Dr. Brantley during this time of crisis,” the organization said in a statement. “We ask everyone to please pray for him and his family.”
The group has been working with the Centers for Disease Control, Doctors Without Borders, the World Health Organization and Liberia’s Ministry of Health to control the outbreak that has infected almost 1,100 people and killed 660.
A second American doctor, Nancy Writebol, is suspected to have contracted the disease as well and is undergoing confirmatory testing.
The World Health Organization announced the record death toll from the West Africa Ebola outbreak has topped 660 with the total number of cases passing 1,000.
“This is a trend, an overall picture. It’s hard to get an exact picture on the scale of the situation at the moment,” WHO spokesman Paul Garwood told reporters. “We’re providing additional support to hospitals and clinics, and we’re seeing that many of these facilities simply don’t have enough people to provide the constant level of care needed.”
The outbreak of the virus began in Guinea but now Sierra Leone has taken over as the most number of infected residents. While Guinea still has the most deaths with 314 in 415 cases, Sierra Leone is quickly gaining at 219 deaths in 454 cases.
The battle against the disease also took a blow when the top doctor in Sierra Leone dealing with the virus became infected.
Sheik Umar Khan, 39, has treated more than 100 victims of the virus. He had previously spoken of his worries about contracting the virus from working with so many patients. Khan, considered one of Sierra Leone’s few experts on the disease, was rushed to a Doctors Without Borders facility for immediate treatment.
The containment of the disease is also threatened after the family of a victim forcibly removed from her quarantine. Police and military officials are searching for her because she is loose in Freetown, a city of one million residents.
The Food and Drug Administration said that a federal employee who found six vials of the deadly smallpox virus in a cardboard box in a storage room at a Maryland lab also found hundreds of vials of other diseases.
The samples included influenza, rickettsia (which can cause the lethal Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever) and dengue.
FDA official said Wednesday the collection of 327 vials of the various diseases was found at the same time as the smallpox virus vials announced last week.
Testing at the CDC discovered the smallpox viruses in the vial were alive and infectious.
“The fact that these materials were not discovered until now is unacceptable,” said Karen Midthun, of FDA’s director for biologics. “However, upon finding these materials our staff did the right thing – they immediately notified the appropriate authorities who secured the materials and determined there was no exposure.”
The FDA said 32 vials of tissue samples and non-contagious virus were destroyed at the laboratory and the remaining 279 samples were sent to the Department of Homeland Security for storage.
A Colorado man is hospitalized with the rarest and deadliest form of the plague.
Jennifer House, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Public Health, said the man is infected with pneumonic plague and is the first case seen in the state since 2004. The man’s identity is being kept from the public but officials say he was exposed in Adams County near Denver.
“He’s on treatment long enough to not be transmissible,” House told Bloomberg News.
She said that doctors believe he contracted the disease from his dog.
“We don’t think it’s out in our air,” House said. “We think it’s in our dead animal populations and dead rodent populations.”
Colorado has had 60 cases of plague since 1957 and nine people have died from the disease. There is no vaccine available for the plague in the U.S. The most common is bubonic plague, which was known for outbreaks during the middle ages.
“The message we’re trying to get out is that the plague bacteria is present here in Colorado, and to take necessary precautions to avoid getting infected,” House said.
Doctors are sounding the alarm about Lyme Disease and the fact it’s beginning to spread nationwide.
“This is a real public health threat,” said Lyme Disease expert Dr. Richard Horowitz. “We have to realize that this has spread. It’s imitating all of these different diseases. And people really need to understand the signs and symptoms and the unreliability of the blood test.”
Dr. Horowitz is trying to raise awareness of Lyme’s ability to mimic other diseases and because of the blood test’s tendencies to return false negatives, the importance of doctors and nurses looking at the symptoms to consider if Lyme is possible despite the test.
He gave the example of a Philadelphia area man named John who was a healthy landscape worker just four years ago. He began to experience muscle twitching and eventually was unable to walk or feed himself. It was only after he developed co-infections to Lyme disease such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever that doctors were able to confirm Lyme.
By then, it was too late for him to be treated by antibiotics and chronic Lyme had set in. Now, John has to take about 60 pills a day for his condition.
Dr. Horowitz believes that the potential cause of long term Lyme is that the body’s ability to filter toxins is damaged. Currently he is running studies to see if filtering toxins from the blood can help long term Lyme patients.
Isaiah Austin, whose dream of playing in the NBA ended when a physical before the draft found a rare genetic disorder, is turning what some consider a huge blow into a moment of praise to the Lord.
Austin, who was symbolically drafted at the NBA Draft by the league as “the league’s best pick”, said that God was simply closing a door and that another one would come open as the Lord leads him.
“I worked so hard to get to this point and unfortunately it was taken away but when God closes one door, He opens up another for you … God has really put will power in my heart to help me push through this … I’m going to dream again,” said Austin. “I’m going to go around and share my story with as many people as I can and just hope to touch people’s lives and let them know that any obstacle that they’re facing, they can get through it. All they have to do is keep a positive mind and thank God for every moment that they’re here on this earth.”
Austin was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, which impacts the heart, eyes, circulatory system and skeleton. His aorta has been growing wider in the last two years and if it continues to expand he will require open heart surgery. His doctors said his condition made it too risky for him to continue competitive basketball and that he could drop dead on the floor at any moment if he continued to play.
Austin says that he plans to remain in the sport in some way and Baylor coach Scott Drew said there’s a coaching position available for Austin if he wants it.
The World Health Organization has released a statement saying that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is raising major concerns that the virus could have an international spread.
The WHO said they are “gravely concerned” about the outbreak that has now killed over 400 people in the deadliest outbreak in world history. The outbreak, which began in Guinea earlier this year, has now spread into Sierra Leone and Liberia. Officials now say that the virus could begin to appear in other nations.
“There is an urgent need to intensify response efforts…this is the only way that the outbreak will be effectively addressed,” WHO officials stated.
The statement from the WHO comes just days after Doctors Without Borders said the outbreak was “out of control.”
Doctors said the only positive in the current outbreak is that unlike previous Ebola outbreaks with had 95 percent death rate, the current outbreak’s rate is 60 percent.
Doctors with Borders say the Ebola outbreak in west Africa is now “totally out of control.”
“The reality is clear that the epidemic is now in a second wave,” Bart Janssens of Doctors Without Borders said. “And, for me, it is totally out of control.”
The group also said they are being stretched to the limit in their ability to respond to the outbreak. They’re issuing a call for other international aid groups to help them try to contain the outbreak and treat the infected patients.
“It’s the first time in an Ebola epidemic where (Doctors Without Borders) teams cannot cover all the needs, at least for treatment centers,” Janssens said.
He added there is a significant increase in the problem.
“I’m absolutely convinced that this epidemic is far from over and will continue to kill a considerable amount of people, so this will definitely end up the biggest ever,” Janssens said.
Janssens said the World Health Organization, which acknowledged this week that the death toll with this outbreak is the highest in world history, is not doing enough to motivate the leaders of the infected countries to stop the spread.
Florida health officials are raising the alarm about two mosquito-borne diseases that have shown up in the state.
The Florida Department of Health stated in its latest weekly report that 24 cases of potentially fatal Dengue Fever have been found in the state along with 18 cases of the extremely painful Chikungunya virus. Both diseases are viral and spread through mosquito bites.
All of the infected people reportedly traveled through the Caribbean or South America and most likely were infected during their travels. However, the health officials cannot confirm they did not contract the virus from a domestic mosquito bite.
“The threat is greater than I’ve seen in my lifetime,” said Walter Tabachnick, director of the Florida Medical Entomological Laboratory and 30-year veteran of epidemiology. “Sooner or later, our mosquitoes will pick it up and transmit it to us. That is the imminent threat.”
Health officials are asking residents to work with local governments to eliminate areas where mosquitos breed. This includes elimination of standing water such as in buckets and rain barrels.
“If there is public apathy and people don’t clean up the yards, we’re going to have a problem,” Tabachnick said.
The Centers for Disease Control has confirmed the death of a Texas patient who contracted a disease connected to Mad Cow Disease.
The patient died from Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. The disease is a rare, degenerative and fatal brain disorder that is caused by the consumption of meat and other products from cows suffering from bovine spongiform encephalopathy or “Mad Cow Disease.”
The CDC said this is the fourth time Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease has been found in the United States. The first three cases were confirmed to have contracted the virus outside the USA where the variant is more prevalent and the most recent patient had extensively traveled to Europe and the Middle East. Most of the world’s cases have been in the United Kingdom and France.
Classic CJD is not caused by the Mad Cow Disease related agent. In the United States, classic CJD is found in one person per 1 million residents each year.
