GENEVA - Ebola’s escalating spread constitutes the worst global health emergency in years, world leaders warned, vowing to dramatically step up the response to the virus that has already killed nearly 4,500 people.
As of Sunday, 4,493 people had died out of a total of 8,997 cases in the outbreak now affecting seven countries, according to latest figures from the World Health Organization.
US President Barack Obama on Wednesday called on the world to do more, while insisting his own country would be “much more aggressive” in its response, after a second Texas hospital worker tested positive for the disease. Some schools in Ohio and Texas closed Thursday amid fears that students or staff had been exposed to a nurse who had Ebola infection during an airline flight.
The US Centers for Disease Control has reached out to 132 people who were on the same October 13 flight as Amber Vinson, but said there was an extremely low risk that anyone was infected.
She had a low-grade fever and was not vomiting or experiencing diarrhea on the trip from Cleveland to Dallas/Fort Worth, but she should not have been allowed to board a commercial airline, CDC chief Tom Frieden said. Top US health officials braced for a grilling Thursday by lawmakers infuriated over the nation’s fumbling response to the Ebola outbreak, as the Obama administration scrambles to contain the disease’s spread.
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) director Thomas Frieden has become the most prominent target of the criticism, which has mounted as a second Texas health care worker became infected with the deadly disease after treating a Liberian man who died of Ebola last week.
The fact that the newly infected Dallas caregiver took a domestic flight the day before she was quarantined magnified global fears about air travel. Obama tried to ease those fears, but urged his counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and Italy to better coordinate their plans to combat the outbreak. France said Thursday it will start carrying out health checks this weekend on all travellers arriving by plane from Guinea, one of the worst-hit nations.
Medics at Paris’s main international Charles de Gaulle airport will take the temperature of passengers arriving from the daily flights still operating from the Guinean capital Conakry, Health Minister Marisol Touraine told AFP. Airports in Britain, Canada and the United States have already introduced stepped-up screening of travellers arriving from West Africa. Senior US lawmakers overseeing homeland security also joined calls Wednesday for a temporary ban on all travel from West Africa.
The hemorrhagic virus has ravaged West African countries Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone since the start of the year, and outside the region, cases have begun surfacing in the United States and Spain.
Moreover, a nurse suspected of having caught the Ebola virus through contact with an infected humanitarian worker was admitted to a hospital near Paris on Thursday, media said.
The woman, suffering from a high fever, was transferred under high security from her home in the Hauts de Seine region of greater Paris to the Begin de Saint-Mande military hospital outside the capital, Le Parisien daily said. The woman had been in regular contact with a French volunteer working with humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans Frontieres) who contracted Ebola in Liberia and was repatriated to France last month. It was not immediately clear from the report if the two came into contact in France or Liberia or what the nurse’s nationality was.
The volunteer, the first French national to be infected with the disease, received an experimental treatment for the virus and subsequently recovered. French Health Minister Marisol Touraine told RTL radio she would make no comment on ‘situations that may or may not be ongoing.’ The ministry said last week it would not comment on suspected Ebola cases until after tests were performed. BFM-TV said the nurse with the suspected case of Ebola had been quarantined but tests had yet to be carried out.
The WHO warned this week that the infection rate could reach 10,000 a week by early December in a worst-case scenario.
“Leaders agreed that this was the most serious international public health emergency in recent years and that the international community needed to do much more and faster,” British Prime Minister David Cameron’s office said.
EU health ministers agreed on Thursday to launch an immediate review of the screening of passengers departing Ebola-hit countries in West Africa, health commissioner Tonio Borg said.
The health ministers meeting in Brussels had also agreed to “coordinate” measures at entry points to the 28-nation European Union, although any decision on screening for Ebola rests with individual countries.
The European Commission, the EU executive, “will immediately undertake an audit of exit screening systems in place in the affected countries... to check their effectiveness and reinforce them as necessary,” Borg told reporters after the meeting. The review of the exit screening in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone will be conducted in coordination with the World Health Organisation, he said.
The Red Cross also urged the international community to focus less on dramatic actions like shutting down airports and entire countries and more on engaging with populations to alter behaviours allowing the outbreak to swell.
“It’s a race against time really,” Matthias Schmale, under secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) told reporters in Geneva.
When faced with deeply engrained traditions, it is not enough to simply tell people they need to quickly bury the dead without touching highly contagious bodies, he said.
“In cultures that depend a lot on touching people when you say your final goodbyes, that’s a hard, (although) rational thing to do,” he said. “Sharing information is not the same as understanding and learning.”
A Liberian minister said Thursday she had gone into quarantine voluntarily after her driver died of the Ebola virus sweeping west Africa.
Liberia has been the hardest hit by the epidemic, with 2,458 deaths out of 4,249 cases, about half the global total, according to World Health Organization figures.
Transport Minister Angela Cassell-Bush said she had quarantined herself after her personal driver became sick.
“I did not have any direct contact with him but I am doing it by precaution,” she said in a statement, adding that she would stay away from work for 21 days under agreed protocols. (AFP)
As of Sunday, 4,493 people had died out of a total of 8,997 cases in the outbreak now affecting seven countries, according to latest figures from the World Health Organization.
US President Barack Obama on Wednesday called on the world to do more, while insisting his own country would be “much more aggressive” in its response, after a second Texas hospital worker tested positive for the disease. Some schools in Ohio and Texas closed Thursday amid fears that students or staff had been exposed to a nurse who had Ebola infection during an airline flight.
The US Centers for Disease Control has reached out to 132 people who were on the same October 13 flight as Amber Vinson, but said there was an extremely low risk that anyone was infected.
She had a low-grade fever and was not vomiting or experiencing diarrhea on the trip from Cleveland to Dallas/Fort Worth, but she should not have been allowed to board a commercial airline, CDC chief Tom Frieden said. Top US health officials braced for a grilling Thursday by lawmakers infuriated over the nation’s fumbling response to the Ebola outbreak, as the Obama administration scrambles to contain the disease’s spread.
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) director Thomas Frieden has become the most prominent target of the criticism, which has mounted as a second Texas health care worker became infected with the deadly disease after treating a Liberian man who died of Ebola last week.
The fact that the newly infected Dallas caregiver took a domestic flight the day before she was quarantined magnified global fears about air travel. Obama tried to ease those fears, but urged his counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and Italy to better coordinate their plans to combat the outbreak. France said Thursday it will start carrying out health checks this weekend on all travellers arriving by plane from Guinea, one of the worst-hit nations.
Medics at Paris’s main international Charles de Gaulle airport will take the temperature of passengers arriving from the daily flights still operating from the Guinean capital Conakry, Health Minister Marisol Touraine told AFP. Airports in Britain, Canada and the United States have already introduced stepped-up screening of travellers arriving from West Africa. Senior US lawmakers overseeing homeland security also joined calls Wednesday for a temporary ban on all travel from West Africa.
The hemorrhagic virus has ravaged West African countries Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone since the start of the year, and outside the region, cases have begun surfacing in the United States and Spain.
Moreover, a nurse suspected of having caught the Ebola virus through contact with an infected humanitarian worker was admitted to a hospital near Paris on Thursday, media said.
The woman, suffering from a high fever, was transferred under high security from her home in the Hauts de Seine region of greater Paris to the Begin de Saint-Mande military hospital outside the capital, Le Parisien daily said. The woman had been in regular contact with a French volunteer working with humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans Frontieres) who contracted Ebola in Liberia and was repatriated to France last month. It was not immediately clear from the report if the two came into contact in France or Liberia or what the nurse’s nationality was.
The volunteer, the first French national to be infected with the disease, received an experimental treatment for the virus and subsequently recovered. French Health Minister Marisol Touraine told RTL radio she would make no comment on ‘situations that may or may not be ongoing.’ The ministry said last week it would not comment on suspected Ebola cases until after tests were performed. BFM-TV said the nurse with the suspected case of Ebola had been quarantined but tests had yet to be carried out.
The WHO warned this week that the infection rate could reach 10,000 a week by early December in a worst-case scenario.
“Leaders agreed that this was the most serious international public health emergency in recent years and that the international community needed to do much more and faster,” British Prime Minister David Cameron’s office said.
EU health ministers agreed on Thursday to launch an immediate review of the screening of passengers departing Ebola-hit countries in West Africa, health commissioner Tonio Borg said.
The health ministers meeting in Brussels had also agreed to “coordinate” measures at entry points to the 28-nation European Union, although any decision on screening for Ebola rests with individual countries.
The European Commission, the EU executive, “will immediately undertake an audit of exit screening systems in place in the affected countries... to check their effectiveness and reinforce them as necessary,” Borg told reporters after the meeting. The review of the exit screening in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone will be conducted in coordination with the World Health Organisation, he said.
The Red Cross also urged the international community to focus less on dramatic actions like shutting down airports and entire countries and more on engaging with populations to alter behaviours allowing the outbreak to swell.
“It’s a race against time really,” Matthias Schmale, under secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) told reporters in Geneva.
When faced with deeply engrained traditions, it is not enough to simply tell people they need to quickly bury the dead without touching highly contagious bodies, he said.
“In cultures that depend a lot on touching people when you say your final goodbyes, that’s a hard, (although) rational thing to do,” he said. “Sharing information is not the same as understanding and learning.”
A Liberian minister said Thursday she had gone into quarantine voluntarily after her driver died of the Ebola virus sweeping west Africa.
Liberia has been the hardest hit by the epidemic, with 2,458 deaths out of 4,249 cases, about half the global total, according to World Health Organization figures.
Transport Minister Angela Cassell-Bush said she had quarantined herself after her personal driver became sick.
“I did not have any direct contact with him but I am doing it by precaution,” she said in a statement, adding that she would stay away from work for 21 days under agreed protocols. (AFP)
