Sierra Leone appealed to the United States on Wednesday to send military aid to help it battle Ebola as it falls behind its West African neighbours Guinea and Liberia in the fight against the virus.
The worst recorded Ebola outbreak has killed at least 5,689 people, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday, as the virus has overwhelmed African countries with weak infrastructure and healthcare systems.
While the outbreak appears to be coming under control in Liberia, thanks partly to a health operation run by U.S. troops, infection rates have accelerated in Sierra Leone.
The rate of transmission is also beginning to slow in neighbouring Guinea, the first country to report an Ebola case, although case numbers are rising in Mali.
“I believe now that the cases are reducing in Liberia, he (President Barack Obama) will ask the Department of Defense and the State Department also to turn attention to helping the efforts in Sierra Leone,” said Alpha Kanu, Sierra Leone’s minister of information and communication.
He also appealed to the United States to help Guinea, and urged Britain to provide more assistance to Sierra Leone.
Guinea’s President Alpha Condé said on Wednesday he is ready to authorize anyone who refuses to let doctors check Ebola suspects for signs of the disease.
Guinea’s President Alpha Condé said on Wednesday he is ready to authorize the use of force if necessary if anyone refuses to let doctors check Ebola suspects for signs of the disease.
“We have an agenda, which is to get rid of this disease as quickly as possible,” he told a news conference.
Britain, the former colonial power, has sent military personnel to establish treatment centres in Sierra Leone, as well as three helicopters and a 100-bed naval hospital.
The U.S. response in Liberia involves 3,000 troops.
“The difference between Liberia and Sierra Leone is that the American response was faster and stronger and more robust in the beginning, using technology that was easier to put up than what the British are doing in Sierra Leone,” he told reporters.
The deputy commanding general of U.S. Operation United Assistance said this week the country had the capacity to help other Ebola-hit countries but denied there were immediate plans to do so.
Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma has introduced emergency Ebola measures. He said it might be necessary to call another three-day lockdown to remove the sick from communities and transfer them to newly built treatment centres.
The European Union announced in Monrovia on Wednesday it would disburse 22 million euros of budget support to help Liberia scale up its efforts to eradicate the virus. (Reuters)
WHO says Ebola cases nears 16,000, death toll rises to 5,689
The death toll in the world’s worst Ebola epidemic has risen to 5,689 out of 15,935 cases reported in eight countries by Nov. 23, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.
Almost all cases and all but 15 deaths have been in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia – the three hardest-hit countries, which reported 600 new cases in the past week, the WHO said in its latest update.
“The total number of cases reported in Sierra Leone since the outbreak began will soon eclipse the number reported from Liberia,” it said. The former British colony has reported 6,599 cases against 7,168 in Liberia.
Transmission of the virus remains intense in Sierra Leone, especially in the west and north, with the capital Freetown still the worst affected area, it said.
Sierra Leone appealed to the United States on Wednesday to send military aid to help it battle Ebola as it falls behind its West African neighbours Guinea and Liberia in the fight against the virus.
“Liberia and Sierra Leone report that fewer than 70 percent of patients are isolated, though there is wide variation among districts,” the WHO said, referring to an international target set for Dec. 1. However, some data is out of date, it said.
Isolation is required to halt further spread of the viral hemorrhagic disease, and the aim is to isolate 100 percent of patients by Jan. 1, it added.
Contacts of people known to be infected should be monitored for symptoms including fever, but relatively low numbers being reported “suggest that in districts with high case incidence fewer contacts are currently registered in connection with each new case than is necessary to accurately monitor chains of transmission”, the WHO warned.
Mali has reported 8 Ebola cases, six of them fatal, and 285 contacts exposed to the virus there are being checked, it said.
WHO teams are evaluating the preparedness of neighbouring countries to combat Ebola, and visits are planned to the Central African Republic, Niger, and Ethiopia next week, it said.
Peter Piot, a leading specialist on the disease, said on Wednesday that West Africa’s Ebola epidemic could worsen further before abating, but that but new infections should start to decline in all affected countries by the end of the year.
The first Cuban doctor infected with Ebola, evacuated from Sierra Leone to Geneva last week, is improving and responding to treatment, the University Hospital of Geneva said in a statement late on Tuesday. His medical team is “reasonably optimistic”. (Reuters)
Ebola vaccine from Glaxo passes early safety test
An experimental Ebola vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline caused no serious side effects and produced an immune response in all 20 healthy volunteers who received it in an early-stage clinical trial, scientists reported on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The trial, which began on Sept. 2 and will monitor the volunteers for 48 weeks, is primarily aimed at assessing how safe the vaccine is. But the immune response offered hope that it would also be effective.
“The safety profile is encouraging, as is the finding that the higher dose of vaccine induced an immune response quite comparable to that which has completely protected (lab) animals from Ebola,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is conducting the trial in Bethesda, Maryland.
The intramuscular vaccine was developed at NIAID and Okairos, a biotechnology company acquired by GlaxoSmithKline. It contains genetic material from two Ebola strains – Zaire, responsible for the current outbreak in West Africa, and Sudan – but no virus, so it cannot cause the disease.
Because it is unethical to expose volunteers to Ebola, researchers assess the effectiveness of candidate vaccines by whether they trigger production of anti-Ebola antibodies and immune-system T cells.
The trial enrolled volunteers ages 18 to 50. Half received a lower dose and half a higher dose. All 20 developed anti-Ebola antibodies within four weeks, with those on the higher dose producing more.
Dose also affected production of T cells; seven of 10 people on the high dose produced one crucial kind of T cell, but only two on the low dose did. The higher the dose required to trigger immunity, the more challenging and expensive it will be to produce large quantities of vaccine, manufacturers say.
Dr. Daniel Bausch of Tulane University, who wrote an accompanying commentary, called the results promising but cautioned that there are many more challenges ahead before the vaccine’s safety and efficacy are established.
Another GlaxoSmithKline vaccine, against the Zaire strain, is undergoing safety trials in England, Mali and Switzerland, while one from Iowa-based NewLink Genetics is being tested in Maryland. This week, Merck announced that it would buy the rights to NewLink’s vaccine for $50 million. A trial of an Ebola vaccine from Johnson & Johnson is scheduled to start in January. (Reuters)