The top doctor in Sierra Leone leading the fight against Ebola has died less than a week after contracting the virus. The death of Sheik Umar Khan comes less than a week after the death of the top doctor fighting the virus in Liberia.
“It is a big and irreparable loss to Sierra Leone as he was the only specialist the country had in viral hemorrhagic fevers,” said Sierra Leone’s chief medical officer, Brima Kargbo.
The 39-year-old Khan is being called a “national hero” by the government for his refusal to avoid being on the front lines to help victims of the virus. Khan died just hours before the President of the country was arriving to check on his condition.
The Ebola outbreak has now officially killed 672 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone but local officials say the toll is much higher because of families that are not bringing their sick relatives to medical facilities. The isolation of the family members is being seen as oppressive by many of the more rural residents of those countries.
Guinea has reported that a new cluster of cases has developed in a mining town in the eastern part of the country and a new isolation ward had to be set up in Siguiri to handle the patients.
Also, some airlines have stopped flights into the countries after an American man who was in Liberia died in Nigeria from the virus after flying after being infected by his sister.
One of the top doctors in Liberia who had treated hundreds of patients of Ebola has died from the disease.
Dr. Samuel Brisbane died Sunday according to a release from government officials. Dr. Brisbane is the first native Liberian doctor to die from the outbreak; a Ugandan doctor who came to assist died earlier this month.
Dr. Brisbane was the medical advisor to former Liberian President Charles Taylor and had worked at the country’s largest hospital, John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Monrovia.
Local officials say that Dr. Brisbane was buried outside the city in an area only known to his family. Another doctor who worked with Dr. Brisbane has also been confirmed to have the virus and is undergoing treatment.
The death comes as other leading doctors in the region are fighting infections. Sierra Leone’s top doctor, Sheik Umar Khan, showed signs of the disease last week and is in treatment. 33-year-old American doctor Kent Brantly is reportedly in grave condition and fighting for his life.
European medical officials have wanted to transfer Dr. Brantly to Europe for treatment but African officials have denied the right to transfer the doctor through their airspace.
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 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.
The deadly MERS virus, originally found in Saudi Arabia and only in a few cases outside that nation, is now considered as having spread across the entire Middle East.
Egypt has issued a travel warning to Saudi Arabia after an Egyptian man has been found to have the fatal virus. Over 100 people have died after contracting the killer disease with a mortality rate over 45%.
The news of the travel warning comes ahead of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca by millions of Muslims around the world.
Egypt’s warning also includes the rare step of telling those with children under 15, adults over 65, pregnant women and anyone who suffers from respiratory diseases to not make the pilgrimage to Mecca this year.
Dr. Ala Alwan of the World Health Organization said the most concerning thing is that most of the cases now have been confirmed as human-to-human transmission rather than from bats or camels.
“Approximately 75 per cent of the recently reported cases are secondary cases, meaning that they are considered to have acquired the infection from another case through human-to-human transmission,” Dr Ala Alwan wrote in a statement.
A virus fatal to pigs is running rampant in the U.S. pig population is causing massive deaths and driving up the prices of pork to record levels.
The PEDv virus has wiped out the entire piglet populations of farms throughout the country. Agriculture officials in Oklahoma reported that one farm lost over 30,000 piglets from a PEDv outbreak.
Scientists say they have been unable to determine the origin of the outbreak.
The USDA reports that 7 million pigs nationwide have died from the virus. The outbreak began in Ohio according to the USDA and is now reported in at least 30 states. The nation’s hog herd has fallen to 63 million nationwide.
The virus is very virulent. One researcher said that one tablespoon of virus infected manure would be enough to infect the entire U.S. pig population.
Saudi Arabia fired Health Minister Abdullah al-Rabiah in the mist of the largest outbreak of the killer MERS virus since its discovery two years ago.
The news comes as two more people were confirmed to have died from the virus. A 73-year-old Saudi man died in Riyadh and a 54-year-old man in Jeddah died on Monday.
Saudi Arabia has been dealing with a major outbreak of the virus with over 20 infections discovered in the last week. The country’s death toll climbed to 83 and the total number of cases jumped to 261. The outbreak of the last week was more than ten percent of the total cases.
The now-former Health Minister had said on Monday he didn’t know why there was a sudden rise in the virus other than noting there was a small increase the previous April.
The World Health Organization confirmed the first cases of the virus in Southeast Asia. There is no vaccine for MERS.
Virologists made a scary new discovery in the investigation of the Ebola outbreak in Guinea.
It’s a new strain of the virus.
Researchers say that the discovery means that the outbreak has no connection to any previous outbreak in Africa. Ebola has a pattern of outbreak in the western parts of the country and the surprise outbreak in east Africa caught many health officials by surprise.
The scientists say that the new virus has been confirmed to have the same unknown ancestor of the western viruses. They say the virus likely was introduced into the region in December 2013.
The virus was also found in fruit bats within the region and it’s possible that the virus had mutated within the bats.
The virologists say that the new strain could be a potential catastrophe among the region as the area has never experienced a major Ebola outbreak until now.
