Conakry (AFP) - Guinea is
racing to contain a deadly Ebola epidemic spreading from its southern
forests to the capital Conakry, as neighbouring Senegal closes its
border.
The European
Union pledged 500,000 euros ($690,000) to fight the contagion, while the
Senegalese interior ministry said border crossings to Guinea would be
closed "until further notice".
The
order affects crossings at Kolda and Kedougou in the south of Senegal
which are heavily used by traders, particularly during a weekly market
attended by thousands from neighbouring countries.
Eight cases of Ebola have been confirmed in Conakry, the Guinean health ministry said late Friday, including one fatality.
Across
the country, "the total number of suspected cases recorded from January
to 28 March 2014 is 111 cases of haemorrhagic fever including 70 deaths
... or a fatality rate of 63 percent," the ministry said in a
statement.
Samples taken from 45 of the suspect cases included 19 which tested positive for Ebola.
Map of West Africa charting the spread of the Ebola outbreak, with facts about the disease (AFP Phot …
Most of the cases were recorded in southern Guinea, but the disease has spread to the capital since Wednesday.
Those
infected have been put in isolation to prevent the virus from
spreading, while aid organisations have sent dozens of workers to help
the poor west African country combat the outbreak of haemorrhagic fever.
- 'Deeply concerned' -
The
EU's aid offer came after a plea for assistance from the Economic
Community Of West African States (ECOWAS). The regional bloc said it was
"deeply concerned" about the epidemic which presented a "serious threat
to the region".
The tropical
virus -- described in some health publications as a "molecular shark" --
leads to haemorrhagic fever, causing muscle pain, weakness, vomiting,
diarrhoea and, in severe cases, organ failure and unstoppable bleeding.
An electron micrograph image of an Ebola virus virion obtained March 24, 2014 from the Centers for D …
No treatment or vaccine is
available, and the Zaire strain detected in Guinea -- first observed 38
years ago in what is today called the Democratic Republic of Congo --
has a 90 percent death rate.
Sakoba
Keita, who heads the Guinean health ministry's prevention division said
it remains unclear how Ebola had arrived in Guinea.
Tests on the other cases of haemorrhagic fever are still ongoing to determine their origin.
"We hope to get (the results) quickly as these cases should be treated like Ebola as they are also deadly," he said.
Guinea
is one of the world's poorest nations despite vast untapped mineral
wealth, with a stagnating economy, youth unemployment at 60 percent and a
rank of 178th out of 187 countries on the UN's Human Development Index.
The
World Health Organisation said Liberia had reported eight suspected
cases of Ebola fever, including six deaths, while Sierra Leone had
reported six suspected cases, five of them fatal.
Ebola
can be transmitted to humans from wild animals, and between humans
through direct contact with another's blood, faeces or sweat, as well as
sexual contact or the unprotected handling of contaminated corpses.
MSF
said the spread of the disease was being exacerbated by people
travelling to funerals in which mourners touch the bodies of the dead.
Guinea
has banned the consumption of bat soup, a popular delicacy in the
country, as the fruit bat is believed to be the host species.
One in 25 patients in U.S. hospitals has an infection acquired as
part of his or her care despite modest progress in controlling those
pathogens inside medical facilities, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention reported Wednesday in its most comprehensive look at a
stubborn and lethal health-care problem.
The CDC’s 2011 survey of 183 hospitals showed that an estimated
648,000 patients nationwide suffered 721,000 infections, and 75,000 of
them died — though it is impossible to tell from the data how many
deaths were directly attributable to the acquired infection, said
Michael Bell, deputy director of CDC’s division of health care quality
promotion. Nevertheless, “today and every day, more than 200 Americans
with healthcare-associated infections will die during their hospital
stay,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said in a news release.
Clostridium difficile. (Courtesy of CDC)
The most common infections are pneumonia (22 percent), surgical site
infections (22 percent), gastrointestinal infections (17 percent),
urinary tract infections (13 percent), and bloodstream infections (10
percent), the agency reported in the study, published Wednesday in the
New England Journal of Medicine.
When coupled with the growing risks posed by of antibiotic resistant bacteria,
the prevalence of hospital-acquired infections remains a serious
problem for care-givers, one that the CDC is continuing to battle on a
state-by-state and even hospital-by-hospital basis, Bell said in a news
conference Wednesday afternoon.
“Sooner or later everyone is likely to become a patient somewhere,”
he said. “We go to the hospital hoping to become better, and mostly we
do, but not always.”
Atop the list of pathogens acquired in hospitals is the bacterium
clostridium difficile (commonly know as c. diff), which can cause
gastroenterological illnesses so severe that removal of a patient’s
colon is sometimes required, Bell said. It was responsible for 12.1
percent of the infections turned up by the survey. Also common was
methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a staph infection
that has become resistant to common antibiotics.
Such infections — rather than ones associated with devices such as
central catheters, urinary catheters and ventilators, comprised the
majority of the health-care-related infections revealed by the survey.
Indeed, Bell said, the rate of infections from “central lines” that are
placed into patients’ major blood vessels has been cut nearly in half
since 2008, and the infection rate after surgery has declined by 20
percent in the same time.
But urinary tract infections, which are not as dangerous, remain persistent, he said.
About 34 million people were admitted to U.S. acute care hospitals in
2012, according to the study, which did not look at other in-patient
settings such as nursing homes. The infection rate declined when
compared with the results tallied by the CDC in 2007, but those were based on historical data rather than a survey, Bell said.
At the news conference, Victoria Nahum, executive director of the Safe Care Campaign, urged
hospital patients to insist on “compulsive hand hygiene” and other best
practices by their care-givers, including physicians, and visitors.
That may mean patients will have to overcome the fear of questioning
doctors about their hygiene while hospitalized, or have a relative or
friend do it for them, she and Bell said.
Nahum’s son, Joshua, died in 2006 at age 27 of a health-care-related
infection just two months after two other members of her family suffered
complications from similar infections.
President Obama’s proposed fiscal 2015 budget includes money to
battle antibiotic resistance. Bell said the continuing effort will
require hospitals to remain judicious about the use of antibiotics in
order to gradually lessen resistance to them, in the hope that some will
become effective again. He said the problem of widespread resistance
also is prompting new approaches to controlling bacteria.
“I remain extremely cautious regarding the growing threat of antibiotic resistance,” Nahum said.
ORLANDO,
Florida (Reuters) - A hammerhead shark dragged a college student in his
kayak up the Atlantic coast for a two-hour "South Florida sleigh ride"
that the kayaker taped with a head-mounted camera and posted on YouTube.
Adam Fisk, 22, posted a five-minute clip of his adventure titled "Lone
Man Gets Towed for Miles in Kayak by 11 Foot Hammerhead Shark."
At one point, Fisk dunked the camera into the water and recorded the shark swimming ahead of the kayak.
A student at Florida Atlantic University, Fisk set out in a kayak on
Sunday with several poles to go fishing before the shark took his bait
near Boynton Beach, Florida.
"I threw my bait out and went to reel my other one in so I wouldnt get
tangled, and I just had time to pick up the rod before the other one
already got picked up by that hammer," Fisk wrote on the YouTube site. (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bToT32GPSo)
"It must have been sitting right under me and I had no idea."
Fisk is a member of Team Rebel Fishing, a group of extreme anglers,
according to its website. The group estimated Fisk was dragged by the
shark for 12 miles.
Fisk told Reuters that the ride started out smoothly but turned frightening when the shark twice reversed course.
"It would do a 180-degree turn and come straight back at me and that
rally scared me because I couldn't see it and I didn't know if it was
coming to bite me," he said.
Fisk said he turned his kayak around until the line got taut and the
shark began pulling again. He said the shark took him out to sea and
around in circles, ending at Lake Worth, Florida.
"Hooked a hammerhead in 50ft of water and got drug out to 250ft," Fisk
posted in his Facebook account of the ride under the headline, "I took a
South Florida sleigh ride today and I aint talkin Santa Claus."
Guinea has forbidden the sale and
consumption of bats and warned against eating rats and monkeys
as the country combats a spread of Ebola, a hemorrhagic fever
with a mortality rate of as much as 90 percent.
“We discovered the vector agent of the Ebola virus is the
bat,” said Remy Lamah, the country’s health minister, in an
interview from the town of N’zerekore today. “We sent messages
everywhere to announce the ban. People must even avoid
consumption of rats and monkeys. They are very dangerous
animals.”
In the west African nation, the Toma, Kissi and Guerze
ethnic groups eat bats with the first two communities living in
an area around the Ebola-stricken towns of Macenta, Gueckedou
and Kissidougou. So far at least 63 people are suspected to have
died in Guinea’s first recorded outbreak of the disease.
“The Kissi community eats bats and the epidemic is making
a lot of devastation," Moriba Traore, an inhabitant of
Gueckedou, said by telephone. “Families in villages lost eight
or ten members and people are dying. We are afraid.”
To contact the reporter on this story:
Ougna Camara in Conakry at
ocamara@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Antony Sguazzin at
asguazzin@bloomberg.net
Gordon Bell
Conakry (AFP) - Guinea battled Wednesday to contain an Ebola
epidemic threatening neighbouring countries as fear and confusion
gripped communities under siege from one of the deadliest viruses known
to mankind.
Aid
organisations have sent dozens of workers to help one of the world's
poorest countries combat a haemorrhagic fever outbreak which has killed
at least 63 people, many of whom have been confirmed as infected by
Ebola.
"On Monday, two more deaths were reported in our area.
People are really frightened," Joseph Gbaka Sandounou, a unit manager
for Plan International in Guinea's south, was quoted as saying in a
statement.
"They have seen people die in a matter of just two or
three days. They are constantly worried who is going to be the next
fatality."
The British-based
charity said people of Guinea's southern forests -- the epicentre of the
outbreak which began in February -- had been terrified by seeing
neighbours bleeding severely as they were struck down by the virus.
"People
have never experienced anything like this before. Rumours are rife
among communities who are trying to come up with their own
explanations," said Sandounou.
Map of West Africa charting the spread of the Ebola outbreak, with facts about the disease (AFP Phot …
Ebola had never spread
among humans in west Africa before February but five deaths being
investigated in Liberia, one in Sierra Leone and others still being
tested could bring the toll from the epidemic to above 70.
"We
are not at the end of this epidemic, we continue every day to record a
number of new cases or fatalities," said Guinea's chief disease
prevention officer Sakoba Keita, confirming the two new deaths.
"But the daily incidence is lessening. We believe the peak has passed."
The
tropical virus -- described in some health publications as a "molecular
shark" -- causes severe fever and muscle pain, weakness, vomiting and
diarrhoea, the shutdown of organs and unstoppable bleeding in severe
cases.
Scientists have examined 45 samples from victims of the
epidemic, with 19 testing positive for Ebola, the International
Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a statement.
An electron micrograph image of an Ebola virus virion obtained March 24, 2014 from the Centers for D …
Other highly-contagious
tropical bugs, including Marburg and Lassa, can lead to similar symptoms
but the authorities have not announced which pathogens were been picked
up in samples where Ebola was not detected.
- Danger of panic spreading -
Sierra
Leone warned on Tuesday that a 14-year-old buried recently may have
been infected in Guinea, while the deaths of four women and a boy in
Liberia are being tested for the killer virus.
Guinea has banned
inhabitants of the south from eating bats, a common feature of the local
diet, as the creatures are considered to be the natural host of the
virus.
Transmission of Ebola
to humans can come from wild animals, direct contact with another
human's blood, faeces or sweat, as well as sexual contact or the
unprotected handling of contaminated corpses.
Fact file on the deadly Ebola virus (AFP Photo/John Saeki/gal)
Doctors Without Borders,
which is known by its French initials "MSF", said the spread of the
disease was being exacerbated by people travelling to funerals in which
mourners touch the dead person's body.
No
treatment or vaccine is available, and the Zaire strain of Ebola
detected in Guinea -- first observed in the Democratic Republic of Congo
38 years ago -- has a 90 percent death rate.
Guinea
is among the planet's poorest nations despite vast untapped mineral
wealth, with a stagnating economy, youth unemployment at 60 percent and a
rank of 178th out of 187 countries on the UN's Human Development Index.
Plan,
MSF and other aid organisations are providing treatment and sanitation
facilities and relaying public health information, especially to
schools, via the media and text messages.
"We
are doing everything we can to treat the patients with dignity, whilst
at the same time protecting the community and family from possible
contamination," said MSF emergency coordinator Marie-Christine Ferir.
"We
want to avoid the danger of the population panicking and it is
important to transmit all the information necessary to understand the
disease and how people can protect themselves."
Some people get back-to-back colds, infected by a new virus
By
Sumathi Reddy
March 24, 2014 7:02 p.m. ET
Rhinoviruses are the main cause of the common cold.
Science Picture Co./Corbis
About a month ago Sharon Gilbert was hit with a runny nose, sore throat and a cough. The whole snotty works.
A
few weeks later she thought she had recovered. Then her husband Derek
got sick, and bam. "Suddenly I started getting all the symptoms [again]
and it was worse," said Ms. Gilbert, a 61-year-old writer in Charleston,
Ill.
In the winter that seems to have
no end in many parts of the country, people like Ms. Gilbert have been
plagued with the seemingly everlasting cold.
That's
partly because the common cold can last longer than many people
think—up to two weeks for the principal symptoms and perhaps weeks more
for a cough that lingers even after the virus has been cleared away.
There's also the possibility of secondary infections such as bacterial
sinusitis.
And some patients might get
back-to-back colds, doctors say. It isn't likely people will be
reinfected with the same virus because the body builds some immunity to
it. But people can pick up another of the more than 200 known viruses
that can cause the common cold, some of which are worse than others.
Adults on average
get two to five colds a year, mostly between September and May. Young
children can get as many as seven to 10 colds.
More than 200 different viruses cause colds, and scientists continue to discover new ones.
Colds are most contagious about two days before symptoms start and in the early stages of illness.
The average cold lasts two to 14 days. Coughs can linger up to six weeks.
Exercise, reducing stress, getting good sleep and hand hygiene can help prevent getting a cold.
Sources: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Common Cold Centre (Cardiff University); CDC.
"When you hear people who have the
cold that 'won't go away,' those are typically back-to-back infections
of which we see a lot of in the cold weather when people are cohorting
together," said Darilyn Moyer, a physician at Temple University Hospital
and chairwoman-elect of the American College of Physicians Board of
Governors.
Influenza may get all the
attention, but the common cold is the leading cause of doctor visits,
according to the National Institutes of Health. Each year, people in the
U.S. get about one billion colds, and 22 million school days are lost
to the stubborn viruses.
Experts say
adults on average get two to five colds a year; school children can get
as many as seven to 10. The elderly tend to get infected less because
they've built up immunity to many viruses. And adults who live or work
with young children come down with more colds.
Don't
I know it. For more than a month now my family seems to be playing a
game of pass-the-nasty-cold. My husband had a cold and lingering cough
for weeks, which we suspect he gave to our infant. Finally I succumbed.
We
blamed the purveyor of all germs, our kindergartner. Just as we were
all recovering, the infant started day care and brought home a virus and
we're all on round two of apparently a different cold.
Experts
say it's possible that the carrier of germs—in this case our
kindergartner—can infect others without having symptoms himself.
"At
any given moment if we were to swab you…we'd probably come up with five
different rhinoviruses sitting in your nose but you're not sick," said
Ann Palmenberg, a researcher at the Institute of Molecular Virology at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Rhinovirus is the most common viral
cause of the common cold, accounting for 30% to 50% of adult colds, and
there are more than 150 strains of it.
To
get infected, the so-called ICAM receptors, which the rhinovirus
attaches to in order to enter the nasal cells, need to be open, Dr.
Palmenberg said.
"Rhinos are out there
all the time, it's just a question of when you are susceptible," she
said. Factors such as stress, lack of sleep and people's overall health
can make them more likely to get infected. More than 150 strains or
genotypes of the rhinovirus have been identified and researchers believe
there are probably many more.
Rhinovirus
replicates best in the relatively lower body temperatures of the upper
respiratory area, such as the nasal passages, sinuses and throat.
Other
viruses, such as the less-common adenovirus, can replicate and attach
to receptors in the upper and lower respiratory tracts, causing a more
serious illness.
Other viruses—including
the coronavirus, respiratory syncytial virus and enterovirus—have also
been identified as causing cold symptoms. "The most confounding thing of
all is that we still haven't identified the cause of 20% to 30% of
adult common colds," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National
Institutes of Health.
Sometimes a cold
that never seems to end could be a sign of something more serious. A
cold may result in a sinus infection, bronchitis or pneumonia. And cold
symptoms are at times confused with seasonal allergies.
A
usually dry cough that lingers after a cold is typically due to
bronchial hyperreactivity or tracheal inflammation, doctors say. "After
you go through an infection in your respiratory system, you can almost
have a transient form of asthma where your bronchial tubes are very
highly reactive and very irritated and inflamed," said Dr. Moyer, of
Temple University Hospital.
A review of
various studies, published last year in the journal Annals of Family
Medicine, found that coughs on average last about 18 days. The report
also said a survey of nearly 500 people found that most participants
expected a cough should disappear in about a week and believed
antibiotics from their doctor would help them. (A big no-no!)
Some
experts believe having one cold virus and a weakened immune system
could make catching another virus easier. Because the epithelial linings
in the nose are weakened when you have a cold, the broken down
mucus-membrane barrier may be more prone to picking up another virus.
But
others suggest that proteins such as interferons, which are secreted
during a cold to help fight the virus, may also boost resistance to
getting infected by a second virus, according to Dr. Fauci, of the NIH.
What
can a person do to prevent or shorten a cold? Nearly everyone knows
someone who swears by taking echinacea or zinc or downing packs of
vitamin C.
But doctors say the evidence
isn't conclusive that any of these remedies helps. Some research
indicates that exercise and meditation could help prevent colds.
The
good news is spring is here, at least officially, so the worst of the
winter cold season should be over. Come summer, however, a new batch of
viruses emerge and you might find yourself saying hello to the pesky
summer cold.
A man is in hospital in Canada with symptoms of a haemorrhagic fever resembling the Ebola virus, a health official has said.
The man had recently returned from Liberia in the west
African region, currently suffering a deadly outbreak of an unidentified
haemorrhagic fever.
He is in isolation in critical condition in Saskatoon, the largest city in Saskatchewan province.
A provincial medical official said there was no risk to the public.
Dr Denise Werker, the province's deputy chief medical
officer, declined to say how long the man had been in Africa but said he
only fell ill after returning to Canada.
She said that was in line with the profile of common deadly
haemorrhagic fever viruses Lassa fever and Ebola, which have an
incubation period of up to 21 days.
She said the people most at risk were healthcare workers who
do not protect themselves from contact with the patient's bodily
secretions.
"There is no risk to the general public," she said. "We
recognise that there is going to be a fair amount of concern and that is
why we wanted to go public with this as soon as possible."
A virus resembling Ebola has struck in Guinea, with cases also reported in Liberia.
As many as 61 people have died of the disease in the remote forests of southern Guinea.
But health officials in the Guinean capital, Conakry, have said the virus is not Ebola.
In Saskatchewan, Dr Werker said the man's diagnosis had not
yet been confirmed and that a laboratory in Winnipeg was testing a
biological specimen from the man.
There is no drug treatment for Ebola, although Lassa can be treated with the drug Ribavirin.
Conakry (AFP) - Health
officials in Guinea battled to contain west Africa's first outbreak of
the deadly Ebola virus as neighbouring Liberia reported its first
suspected victims and a traveller returning to Canada was hospitalised
with suspicious symptoms.
At least 59
people are known to have died in Guinea's southern forests and there are
six suspected cases in Liberia which, if confirmed, would mark the
first spread of the highly contagious pathogen into another country.
And
there are fears the virus may have crossed continents, with a man
returning to Canada from Liberia seriously ill in hospital after
experiencing symptoms consistent with the virus, health officials said.
"As
of this morning six cases have been reported of which five have already
died -- four female adults and one male child. One of the suspected
cases, a female child, is under treatment," Liberian Health Minister
Walter Gwenigale said in a statement.
"The team is already
investigating the situation, tracing contacts, collecting blood samples
and sensitising local health authorities on the disease," he added.
Gwenigale
did not specify the victims' nationalities, but Doctors Without Borders
(MSF) said they were Liberian residents who had attended funerals in
the Ebola-hit area of Guinea, which has strong "family ties" with
northern Liberia.
"People come to attend funerals on one side and
unfortunately they unwittingly get infected and then return home,"
Brussels-based MSF emergency coordinator Marie-Christine Ferir told AFP.
Fact file on the deadly Ebola virus (AFP Photo/John Saeki/gal)
The local health ministry in Canada's Saskatchewan province
said a man had been placed in solitary confinement, with his family in
quarantine, pending expected results on Tuesday of tests.
"All we
know at this point is that we have a person who is critically ill who
travelled from a country where these diseases occur," Denise Werker,
joint director of health in Saskatchewan, in western Canada, said.
To
date, no treatment or vaccine is available for the Ebola pathogen,
which kills between 25 and 90 percent of those who fall sick, depending
on the strain of the virus, according to the World Health Organization
(WHO).
Officials from the Guinean health ministry and the WHO met Sunday in Conakry for urgent talks on the crisis.
"The
total suspect cases recorded to date amount to 86 cases with 59
deaths," the health ministry said in a statement, indicating that most
cases reported since the start of the outbreak in early February were in
Guinea's south.
The first
analyses of samples by the Pasteur Institute in the French city of Lyon
showed that cases in southern Guinea were due to the Ebola virus.
Officials from the World Health Organization wear protective clothing as they prepare to enter Kagad …
Three cases of haemorrhagic fever, two fatal, have also been reported in Conakry, but tests for Ebola proved negative.
Transmission
to humans can come from wild animals, or from direct contact from
another human's blood, faeces or sweat, or by sexual contact and the
unprotected handling of contaminated corpses.
- 'Molecular shark' -
The
tropical virus -- described in some health publications as a "molecular
shark" -- can fell its victims within days, causing severe fever and
muscle pain, weakness, vomiting and diarrhoea -- in some cases shutting
down organs and causing unstoppable bleeding.
It
was first discovered in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1976.
The central African country has suffered eight outbreaks.
The
most recent epidemic, also in the DRC, infected 62 people and left 34
dead between May and November 2012, according to the country's health
ministry.
Although there have
also been outbreaks among humans in Uganda, the Republic of Congo and
Gabon, the disease had never before been detected in people in west
Africa.
The aid organisation
Plan International warned that the epidemic risked spreading to
neighbouring countries because of the free movement of people across
borders.
Sierra Leonean aid organisation the Health For All Coalition warned of a high risk of transmission in border areas.
"People,
goods and animals -- such as sheep, goats and cows used in Sierra Leone
-- come from Guinea and it is these districts that they are brought
into. And in these areas, people hunt for birds, monkeys and baboons for
food."
Adjoining Senegal, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast have reactivated their epidemiological surveillance systems.
The
head of Ivory Coast's National Public Hygiene Institute, Simplice
Dagnan, said officials were worried the virus could "easily" arrive
there, warning: "Animals don't recognise borders."
FREETOWN (Reuters) - An
outbreak of haemorrhagic fever that has killed 29 people in Guinea may
have spread across the border into neighbouring Sierra Leone, according
to a World Health Organisation (WHO) document and a senior Sierra Leone
health official.
Guinean health
officials have registered 49 cases of infection in three southeastern
towns and the capital Conakry since the outbreak was first reported on
February 9.
While the exact
type of the fever, which is characterised by bleeding, has yet to be
identified, a senior official in Guinea said on Friday preliminary tests
had narrowed down the possibilities to Ebola or Marburg Haemorrhagic
Fever.
WHO officials,
however, suspect Lassa Fever may be behind the outbreak, cases of which
have now also been reported in a border region in Sierra Leone,
according to minutes of a March 18 teleconference seen by Reuters.
Sierra Leone's Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brima Kargbo said authorities
were investigating the case of a 14-year-old boy who died in the town of
Buedu in the eastern Kailahun District.
The boy had travelled to Guinea to attend the funeral of one of the outbreak's earlier victims.
Kargbo said a medical team had been sent to Buedu to test those who came into contact with the boy before his death.
International medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) announced
on Saturday it was reinforcing its team in Guinea. It is also flying in
33 tonnes of medicines and equipment and is setting up isolation units
in three towns.
"These
structures are essential to prevent the spread of the disease, which is
highly contagious," Dr. Esther Sterk, MSF's Tropical Medicine Adviser,
said in a statement. "Specialised staff are providing care to patients
showing signs of infection"
Ebola and Marburg are lethal diseases caused by similar viruses that are
among the most virulent pathogens known to infect humans, the WHO says
on its website.
Humans
contract Lassa Fever, which is endemic in West Africa, from contact with
food or household items contaminated with rodent faeces. The disease
can then be transmitted from person to person.
An Ebola outbreak in Guinea has led to the deaths of 59
people and is continuing to spread throughout Africa. The outbreak is so
bad that Doctors Without Border has already flown in doctors and medial
supplies to help treat the sick and contain the virus. Quarentine areas have
been created where those infected with the virus can be treated without
the risk of infecting others and spreading the dangerous and deadly
disease.
Ebola is a form of hemoragic fever. Symptoms of the virus appear
flu-like at first, but quickly worsen to include severe abdominal pain,
diarrhea, and vomiting. Headache, sore throat and rashes are also
common. If left untreated, those infected with an Ebola virus can fall
into a coma and die.
One of the most notable and horrific symptoms of the disease is the
bleeding from mucuous membranes. Bleeding occurs in about 50% of Ebola
cases and is one of the ways that the virus is spread from person to
person. Prognosis is poor but survival is possible. Patients who do
survive can either recover quickly or face many complications along the
path to recovery.
There have been many attempts to create vaccinations for Ebola, but
none of them have been approved. Scientists are continuing to work on
possible vaccines and one may be approved in the near future. Until
then, Ebola is treated by preventing dehydration, managing pain and
administering anticoagulants to prevent severe bleeding.
In Guinea, 59 of the 80 people infected during the outbreak have
died, three of which were young children. The arrival of supplies and
doctors may mean a higher survival rate for those infected. The ability
to quarentine the infected patients will have the greatest effect as it
will help control the outbreak and prevent the virus from spreading.
“These structures are essential to prevent the spread of the disease, which is highly contagious,” explained Dr. Esther Sterkof of Doctors Without Borders, adding, “Specialized staff are providing care to patients showing signs of infection.”
Currently, the outbreak is only occuring in the forest area of
southern Guinea. Health officials are providing free treatment for the
infected and are urging people within the area to stay calm, wash their
hands often and report any symptoms to health officials or the
authorities. Image via Wikimedia Commons
March 20, 2014 10:25 PM MOORPARK (CBSLA.com) — A 2-year-old Moorpark boy is the latest to be diagnosed with a mysterious polio-like illness.
When Lucian Olivera was 11 months, he had an ear infection. Then, he couldn’t stand or use his legs.
For months, doctors didn’t know what was wrong.
“I felt helpless. It was extremely frustrating. It was hard to sit and not be able to help him,” Olivera’s mother, Erin, said.
On Friday, the family went to Stanford University, where it was confirmed Olivera had the polio-like syndrome.
“You don’t realize what you have until something goes really, really wrong,” Erin said.
So far, there have been 20 cases of the paralyzing virus in the state.
Doctors said Olivera’s case is the first in Southern California.
They’re still researching all the possibilities.
“Really, it’s unknown the severity of this for each individual. The
thought is that it is permanent, but we don’t know all the things that
will happen to every patient,” Dr. John Dingilian said.
KCAL9’s Brittney Hopper reported that Olivera has to wear a brace for
his legs. He will most likely never be able to walk on his own.
Olivera’s mother, however, said it’s his smile and determination that keeps everyone going.
“You’ll see him trying his hardest with the cane and that determination makes me keep going forward,” Erin said.
If you're a dinosaur with a nickname as funky as "the chicken from hell," you had better be able to back it up.
A
dinosaur called Anzu wyliei that scientists identified on Wednesday
from fossils found in North Dakota and South Dakota does just that. It
had a head shaped like a bird's, a toothless beak, an odd crest on its
cranium, hands with big sharp claws, long legs for fast running and was
probably covered in feathers.
It
is the largest North American example of a type of bird-like dinosaur
well known from Asia. Its extensive remains offer a detailed picture of
the North American branch of these dinosaurs that had remained
mysterious since their first bones were found about a century ago, the
scientists said.
What
would someone think if they encountered this creature that lived 66
million years ago? "I don't know whether they would scream and run away,
or laugh, because it is just an absurd-looking monster chicken," said
University of Utah paleontologist Emma Schachner, one of the
researchers.
Anzu wyliei measured over 3 meters long, 1.5 meters tall at the hip and weighed about 200 to 300 kg, the researchers said.
"It
has the nickname 'the chicken from hell.' And that's a pretty good
description," said paleontologist Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of
Natural History in Pittsburgh, who led the research published in the
journal PLOS ONE.
"If
you could get in a time machine and go back to Western North America at
the end of the age of dinosaurs and see this thing, I would say your
first reaction might be, 'What a weird looking bird,'" Lamanna added.
"It would not look like most people's conception of a dinosaur."
Scientists
think birds arose much earlier from small feathered dinosaurs. The
earliest known bird is 150 million years old. This dinosaur's bird-like
traits included a beak, hollow leg bones and air spaces in its backbone,
paleontologist said Hans-Dieter Sues of the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of Natural History.
Its bizarre head crest resembled that of the cassowary, a flightless bird native to Australia and New Guinea.
Fossils
of feathers are extremely rare and they were not found with any of the
three partial skeletons of Anzu wyliei. But the researchers believe it
had feathers based on fossils of close relatives from China that have
clear evidence of them.
Asian cousins
It
closely resembles its Asian cousins like Oviraptor, whose fossils have
been found brooding over a clutch of its eggs in a bird-like manner. The
Asian part of the family includes many well-preserved examples, from
ones as small as a turkey to one even bigger than Anzu wyliei. The North
American branch until now had been represented by largely fragmentary
remains.
Anzu
wyliei lived at the sunset of the age of dinosaurs, not long before an
enormous meteorite is thought to have struck Earth about 65.5 million
years ago and wiped them out along with hordes of other creatures, while
sparing many birds.
It
lived in a humid, warm, low-lying environment dotted with rivers and
swamps that may have looked like the Louisiana bayou. It was lush with
vegetation and plant-eating dinosaurs like the horned Triceratops,
armored Ankylosaurus, dome-headed Pachycephalosaurus and duck-billed
Edmontosaurus.
But also hanging around the neighborhood was one of the fiercest predators in Earth's history, Tyrannosaurus rex.
Anzu
wyliei may have been an omnivore, munching on leaves, fruits or flowers
while also swallowing the occasional mammal foolish enough to cross its
path, the researchers said.
It
probably needed to be careful not to end up on someone else's menu. "To
a T. rex, this thing would not look like a 'chicken from hell.' It
would look like lunch," Lamanna said.
Its
genus name, Anzu, is named after a feathered demon in Sumerian
mythology. Its species name, wyliei, honors the grandson of a trustee of
the Carnegie museum in Pittsburgh where the lead researcher works.
The
three sets of bones - which together included almost all parts of the
skeleton - come from a region famed for dinosaur remains known as the
Hell Creek Formation of the Dakotas and Montana. Two of the three sets
of remains had partially healed injuries, perhaps the remnants of a
couple of dinosaur tussles.
It
is one of the big scientific mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease: Why do
some people whose brains accumulate the plaques and tangles so strongly
associated with Alzheimer’s not develop the disease?
Now,
a series of studies by Harvard scientists suggests a possible answer,
one that could lead to new treatments if confirmed by other research.
The
memory and thinking problems of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias
may be related to a failure in the brain’s stress response system, the
new research suggests. If this system is working well, it can protect
the brain from abnormal Alzheimer’s proteins; if it gets derailed, key
areas of the brain start degenerating.
“This
is an extremely important study,” said Li-Huei Tsai, director of the
Picower institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, who was not involved in the research but wrote a
commentary accompanying the study. “This is the first study that is
really starting to provide a plausible pathway to explain why some
people are more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s than other people.”
Amyloid plaques form in the brain of a patient with Alzheimer’s disease.Credit
Yankner laboratory
The research, published on Wednesday
in the journal Nature, focuses on a protein previously thought to act
mostly in the brains of developing fetuses. The scientists found that
the protein also appears to protect neurons in healthy older people from
aging-related stresses. But in people with Alzheimer’s and other
dementias, the protein is sharply depleted in key brain regions.
Experts
said if other scientists can replicate and expand upon the findings,
the role of the protein, called REST, could spur development of new
drugs for dementia, which has so far been virtually impossible to treat.
But they cautioned that much more needs to be determined, including
whether the decline of REST is a cause, or an effect, of brain
deterioration, and whether it is specific enough to neurological
diseases that it could lead to effective therapies.
“You’re
going to see a lot of papers now following up on it,” said Dr. Eric M.
Reiman, executive director of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in
Phoenix, who was not involved in the study. “While it’s a preliminary
finding, it raises an avenue that hasn’t been considered before. And if
this provides a handle on which to understand normal brain aging, that
will be great too.”
REST,
a gene regulator that switches off certain genes, is primarily known to
keep fetal neurons in an immature state until they develop to perform
brain functions, said Dr. Bruce A. Yankner, a professor of genetics at
Harvard Medical School and the new study’s lead author. By the time
babies are born, REST becomes inactive, he said, except in some areas
outside the brain like the colon, where it seems to suppress cancer.
While
investigating how different genes in the brain change as people age,
Dr. Yankner’s team was startled to find that REST was the most active
gene regulator in older brains.
“Why
should a fetal gene be coming on in an aging brain?” he wondered. He
hypothesized that it was because in aging, as in birth, brains encounter
great stress, threatening neurons that cannot regenerate if harmed.
His
team discovered that REST appears to switch off genes that promote cell
death, protecting neurons from normal aging processes like energy
decrease, inflammation and oxidative stress.
Analyzing
brains from brain banks and dementia studies, the researchers found
that brains of young adults aged 20 to 35 contained little REST, while
healthy adults between the ages of 73 and 106 had a lot. REST levels
grew the older people got, so long as they did not develop dementia,
suggesting REST is related to longevity.
But
in people with Alzheimer’s, mild cognitive impairment, frontotemporal
dementia and Lewy body dementia, the brain areas affected by these
diseases contained much less REST than healthy brains.
This
was true only in people who actually had memory and thinking problems.
People who remained cognitively healthy, but whose brains had the same
accumulation of amyloid plaques and tau tangles as people with
Alzheimer’s, had three times more REST than dementia sufferers.
REST
levels dropped as symptoms worsened, so people with mild cognitive
impairment had more REST than Alzheimer’s patients. And only key brain
regions were affected. In Alzheimer’s, REST steeply declined in the
prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, areas critical to learning, memory
and planning. Other areas of the brain not involved in Alzheimer’s
showed no REST drop-off.
It
is not yet possible to analyze REST levels in the brains of living
people, and several Alzheimer’s experts said that fact limited what the
new research could prove.
John
Hardy, an Alzheimer’s researcher at University College London,
cautioned in an email that information from post-mortem brains cannot
prove a decline in REST causes dementia because death may produce
unrelated damage to brain cells.
To
probe further, the team conducted what both Dr. Tsai and Dr. Reiman
called a “tour de force” of research, examining REST in mice, roundworms
and cells in the lab.
“We wanted to make sure the story was right,” Dr. Yankner said. “It was difficult to believe at first, to be honest with you.”
Especially
persuasive was that mice genetically engineered to lack REST lost
neurons as they aged in brain areas afflicted in Alzheimer’s.
Dr.
Yankner said REST appears to work by traveling to a neuron’s nucleus
when the brain is stressed. In dementia, though, REST somehow gets
diverted, traveling with toxic dementia-related proteins to another part
of the neuron where it is eventually destroyed.
Experts
said the research, while intriguing, leaves many unanswered questions.
Bradley Wise of the National Institute on Aging’s neuroscience division,
which helped finance the studies, said REST’s role needs further
clarification. “I don’t think you can really say if it’s a cause of
Alzheimer’s or a consequence of Alzheimer’s” yet, he said.
Dr.
Samuel Gandy, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center,
wondered if REST figured only in neurodegenerative diseases or in other
diseases too, which could make it difficult to use REST to develop
specific treatments or diagnostic tests for dementia.
“My
ambivalence is, is this really a way that advances our understanding of
the disease or does this just this just tell us this is even more
complicated than we thought?” he said.
Dr.
Yankner’s team is looking at REST in other neurological diseases, like
Parkinson’s. He also has thoughts about a potential treatment, lithium,
which he said appears to stimulate REST function, and is considered
relatively safe.
But
he and other experts said it was too early. “I would hesitate to start
rushing into lithium treatment” unless rigorous studies show it can
forestall dementia, said Dr. John Morris, an Alzheimer’s researcher at
Washington University in St. Louis.
Still,
Dr. Morris said, the REST research the team conducted so far is “very
well done, and certainly helps support this idea that we’ve all tried to
understand about why Alzheimer’s is age-associated and why, while
amyloid is necessary for the development of Alzheimer’s disease, it
certainly is not sufficient.” He added, “There have to be some other
processes and triggers that result in Alzheimer’s.”
Correction: March 19, 2014
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the gender of Dr. Li-Huei Tsai. She is a woman.
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