The World Health Organization’s assurances that the Ebola virus would not spread from an American man who contracted the disease and then flew to Nigeria where he died has been shown to be false.
Nigerian health officials confirmed Monday that one of the doctors who was treating Patrick Sawyer as he died is now infected with the deadly virus.
Nigerian officials now say they’re doing all they can to track down health workers who had contact with Sawyer and also those who flew with him on the flight to Lagos, Nigeria. Lagos is Nigeria’s most populous city.
Nigerian Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu revealed that three other people have been showing signs of Ebola and are currently awaiting test results.
Authorities in Liberia ordered Monday for all the bodies of Ebola victims to be cremated in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading to family members at funerals or during transport to burial sites.
Doctors Without Borders says this is the first time Ebola has been able to entrench itself in major African cities.
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 United Nations has declared the world is now officially in the post-antibiotic age.
The World Health Organization said Wednesday that the discussion regarding the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria is no longer a theoretical discussion and a harsh reality that the world needs to confront.
“The implications will be devastating,” the WHO said in a report.
The WHO report included shocking information. The report shows that the most well known of the “superbugs”, MRSA, will kill more people in the United States than AIDS. The report says a similar situation will occur this year in Europe.
International aid groups are joining the WHO in raising the alarm.
“We see horrendous rates of antibiotic resistance wherever we look in our field operations, including children admitted to nutritional centers in Niger, and people in our surgical and trauma units in Syria,” Jennifer Cohn of Doctors Without Borders told Fox.
The outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa is so out of control that airlines are now banning anyone with flu like symptoms from boarding planes.
A simple fever is cause to be prohibited from boarding any flight from nations that are confirmed to have an outbreak of the virus.
“It’s probably one of the more complicated outbreaks because it is occurring in a very densely-populated urban area, unlike previous outbreaks,” Dr. Tim Jagatic of Doctors Without Borders told NBC.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN traveled to Conakry, Guinea and said the flight into the country was nearly empty as were hotels. The outbreak in the city has caused hundreds of thousands to flee into the rural areas. However, the rural part of the country is where the outbreak first began months ago.
The Guinea health ministry, however, is cautiously optimistic they have the outbreak now under control after reporting significantly fewer deaths from the virus during the last week. 106 of the 159 confirmed or suspected victims of the virus have died since the beginning of the outbreak.
The World Health Organization said it could take two to four months to truly control the outbreak.
The U.S. Department of Defense has opened a laboratory in neighboring Liberia because of an increase in Ebola cases connected to the Guinea strain.
The H7N9 bird flu has claimed another victim in Hong Kong.
The death marks the third death in the city since the arrival of the virus from China. The male victim, who has recently visited the Chinese city of Shenzhen, was admitted to the hospital less than 24 hours before he died.
The World Health Organization has been quietly using a new term when talking about transmission of the virus between humans. Studies of cases in China show that it is possible to transfer the virus between people so the term “sustained human-to-human transmission” is being used meaning that they don’t see infections happening on a mass scale.
The changes have happened since the virus was spotted in both Taiwan and Hong Kong, raising fears the virus is making its way out of China toward emerging nations that are not ready to handle the deadly virus.
The H7N9 virus was discovered last week at a Hong Kong market resulting in the slaughter of 20,000 birds.
The World Health Organization has released a report showing a dramatic increase in cancer is likely over the next 20 years and that most of the cancer cases will strike in the emerging world.
The World Cancer Report shows a jump in new cancer cases of 1.4 million in the four years between 2008 and 2012. Of the 14.1 million new cases in 2012, 58% of the patients died from their disease.
However, the most shocking part of the report is that the WHO predicts cancer rates will increase as much as 70% in the next 20 years reaching an expected level of 25 million a year. Using the 58% mortality rate from 2012, that would mean 14.5 million cancer deaths in 2032.
The biggest growth in cancer rates will not be in the countries that currently face the most cases and have the strongest medical systems. The WHO reports says emerging nations with poor economies will see surges from cancers triggered by infections like cervical cancer and from tobacco, alcohol and processed food use.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for men while breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for women.
Six new cases of the deadly MERS virus have appeared in the Middle East.
Five people in Saudi Arabia and one person in the United Arab Emirates have been infected with MERS according to the World Health Organization. One of the patients has died, bringing the death toll from the virus to 74 of 176 confirmed cases.
The WHO said the case in the United Arab Emirates was a woman married to a man who has been previously diagnosed with the disease. She is being kept in isolation in a hospital despite not showing any adverse symptoms.
Officials in the region are citing new research showing transfer between camels and humans in a warning telling people at risk for the virus to avoid barns and farms.
With the Muslim Hajj only months away, Saudi Arabia has reported two more deaths from the MERS virus.
The death toll is now 38 from the new virus. The Saudi Health Ministry also said that three more positive cases have been found. The death rate for the virus is still over 50%. Continue reading →
