The return of mutated Ebola?

Techno has an entire thread going on this and has done an amazing job tracking it. Many thanks to techno! We can only assume here the ebola vax has failed.


Ebola experts from CDC were pulled from outbreak zone amid security concern:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was forced to withdraw its Ebola experts from an outbreak zone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo several weeks ago amid heightened security concerns, a decision that is fueling worry over the impact on efforts to contain the epidemic, according to U.S. officials and public health experts familiar with the matter.

The Ebola experts — among the most experienced on the planet — and other U.S. government employees have been told by the State Department that they cannot travel to eastern DRC to help with the on-the-ground response.

As a result, Dr. Pierre Rollin — a fixture of Ebola responses for decades — has been consigned to the capital, Kinshasa, more than 1,000 miles away, where he is advising the ministry of health. Other CDC staffers are helping DRC’s eastern neighbors beef up their health security operations and prepare in other ways in case Ebola spreads across DRC’s borders. Some have been detailed to the World Health Organization’s Geneva headquarters.

A number of other organizations — Doctors Without Borders, the International Federation of the Red Cross, the nonprofit medical group Alima — are also assisting the effort to contain the virus.

But the CDC has expertise the response teams need, said Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“CDC has responded to nearly two dozen filovirus outbreaks in its history and has people who’ve been working on these issues for 30 years. It doesn’t make sense to have those people hundreds or thousands of miles away from where the disease is actually spreading,” Inglesby said.

“It would provide a lot of value to have experienced leaders at CDC who’ve been in the situation before contributing what they can to the larger effort. I think it’s an important moment to think about that,” he said.

A handful of CDC officials were sent to eastern DRC early in the response to the epidemic, which began to spread in July. The agency’s director, Dr. Robert Redfield, briefly visited the region in August, stopping at the response headquarters in the city of Beni.

But the region is effectively a war zone, with over 1 million displaced people and scores of armed rebel groups that wage battle against government troops. A deadly attack on DRC forces near Beni in late August led to an order for U.S. staff to withdraw from the outbreak zone.

Initially they were pulled back to Goma, a large city south of the area where the outbreak is occurring. What was initially thought to be perhaps a temporary situation has become the status quo.

Public health experts familiar with the discussions over whether to deploy U.S. personnel to the outbreak zone said the decisions have been influenced by the long shadow of the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, which killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

“This outbreak is occurring in a highly insecure environment, which complicates public health response activities,” a State Department official, who spoke on condition he not be named, said Sunday.

https://www.statnews.com/2018/10/14/cdc-withdrew-ebola-experts-outbreak-zone/


Ebola experts from CDC were pulled from outbreak zone amid security concern:

Thanks, Guys! It's nice to be appreciated.

As far as I can tell, most press people report fairly accurately on stuff - but only on what they want you to know. I have caught Fox News actually "bare-faced" lying, but generally the press just lie by omission.

Bearing that in mind, here is the latest:

Ebola crisis: WHO holds EMERGENCY MEETING as outbreak spreads - ‘EXTREMELY WORRYING’

THE World Health Organisation (WHO) will convene an emergency meeting on Wednesday to decide whether eastern Congo’s Ebola outbreak is a public health emergency of international concern, following a spike in confirmed cases and attacks on health workers.
By Romina McGuinness
PUBLISHED: 18:19, Tue, Oct 16, 2018 | UPDATED: 19:09, Tue, Oct 16, 2018

The African country’s second major Ebola virus outbreak since January is already nearly twice as deadly as the first and shows no sign of abating.

The committee of experts is expected to make recommendations to manage the outbreak, which was declared on August 1 and has worsened, threatening to spread into neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda.

On Monday, Congo’s health ministry said that in the past week alone 33 people had been confirmed with Ebola virus and 24 of them had died. The latest cases were recorded between October 8 and October 14, health officials said.

More than 200 suspected cases of the virus, which causes a deadly haemorrhagic fever, have been reported in this outbreak, the country’s second this year. All but a dozen of them have been confirmed, while some 130 people have died since July.

Ebola spreads through contact with the bodily fluids of its victims. The health ministry said that 73 patients had received new experimental treatments. Of them, just over half recovered, 20 were still in hospital and the rest have died.

The number of new cases per day has more than doubled since September, as fear and suspicion of medical authorities and worsening security conditions are hindering efforts at containment, according to local aid agencies.

"The current spike in Ebola cases and deaths is extremely worrying,” a spokesperson for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said last week.

The outbreak is centred in the city of Beni, where rebels killed at least 18 people in an attack last month, forcing health workers to suspend operations for several days.

Four civilians were killed in another attack near Beni last Tuesday, according to the United Nations. The IRC suspended programmes the next day, resuming later in the week but only within the city’s limits.

The region has been a hot spot of armed rebellion and ethnic killing since two civil wars in the late 1990s.

“It’s likely that the forced suspension in programming due to insecurity and community resistance in and around Beni are major factors in this [worsening epidemic],” Michelle Gayer, IRC’s senior director of emergency health, said.

The Red Cross also expressed concern that violence was contributing to the rise in Ebola cases in the conflict-hit region, adding that this could be a “tipping point for an accelerated spread of the disease”.

“Conspiracy theories, fear and mistrust around the disease have caused people to resist help and hide symptoms,” Red Cross spokesman Euloge Ishimwe told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The deadly outbreak is expected to last “at least” another three or four months, but if insecurity continues there could be “a much larger wave building,” the WHO has warned.

Source:   https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1032392/ebola-outbreak-dr-congo-uganda-WHO-world-health-organisation