Ebola crisis: Nigeria declared free of virus

[tetano]

Son of Nigeria's hero doctor, who spotted Ebola patient, speaks of pride
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Nigeria has been declared officially free of Ebola after six weeks with no new cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

Africa's most populous country won praise for its swift response after an infected Liberian diplomat brought the disease there in July.

The WHO officially declared Senegal Ebola-free on Friday.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-29685127

[Gert van der Hoek]

Re: Ebola crisis: Nigeria declared free of virus

Nigeria is now free of Ebola virus transmission

Situation assessment - 20 October 2014

Nigeria is now free of Ebola virus transmission

The lines on the tabular situation reports, sent to WHO each day by its country office in Nigeria, have now been full of zeros for 42 days.

WHO officially declares that Nigeria is now free of Ebola virus transmission.

This is a spectacular success story that shows that Ebola can be contained. The story of how Nigeria ended what many believed to be potentially the most explosive Ebola outbreak imaginable is worth telling in detail.

Such a story can help the many other developing countries that are deeply worried by the prospect of an imported Ebola case and eager to improve their preparedness plans. Many wealthy countries, with outstanding health systems, may have something to learn as well.

More: WHO

[zincfinger]

Re: Ebola crisis: Nigeria declared free of virus

What Nigeria's success in halting Ebola graphically illustrates is that had the world been distributing resources remotely equitably and using them wisely, this outbreak would never have run out of control.

It was procedures, facilities, training and organization put in place and used by the Gates Foundation for the control of polio and other diseases that enabled the immediate, well directed, superbly executed and highly effective response to Ebola in Nigeria that enabled its rapid control.

Those things are exactly what was so sorely lacking in the countries where Ebola has run rampant. What the Western world still largely misses is that much the same deficiencies are also present there, especially in the USA (with its two tiered first world/third world health care system) and in parts of Europe where "austerity" has been inflicted. It is no coincidence that austerity abused Spain and the two tiered HCS USA are the placed where the handling of Ebola was so seriously botched from the beginning.

The course of an epidemic is affected just as strongly by social, economic and political conditions as it is by the characteristics of the disease itself. WWI was the root cause of the severity of the 1918 "Spanish" influenza (thru crowded conditions in troop barracks and transports) and the epidemic put an early end to WWI.

If we cannot acknowledge and deal with the implications of those critical factors we will not be able to control or contain the disease in the first world and it will run its course.

Homeless shelters in the USA are severely overcrowded and almost ideal environments for the very rapid spread (and for selection for greater virulence and transmissibility as well) should Ebola get into that environment. Should local and regional and the national government in the USA resort to its usual highly counter productive approach of blaming the victims and supplying grossly inadequate resources to deal with the situation, the result would be spreading the disease much faster and farther than would be the case with humane and ethical treatment. Faced with a prospect of just being cooped up to live or die (as was the case in Freetown) people would disperse as widely as possible. And the homeless, more than anyone else, are excruciatingly aware of the actual ugly realities and know better than to count on government promises and statements.

Local governments in the USA are already seriously persecuting and abusing the homeless (laws against sitting or standing in one place in public (much less sleeping), laws making it a crime for anyone to feed the homeless or provide assistance, laws making it a crime to fail to pay exorbitant fines for things that should not be an offense, further fines for being unable to pay the fines, court costs, incarceration, levied with costs of incarceration, levied with costs of parole, for those lucky enough to get it......) It is exceedingly likely that, should Ebola get into the homeless community, local and regional governments in the USA will take horrendously misguided approaches that would inevitably be counter effective and drive people to flee and spread the disease much farther and faster than would otherwise have been the case.

The most serious danger in the situation would be the use of local police forces for control with their well established tendency to shoot first and use a "throw down" if a mistake was made. If any control action was unavoidable,, only federal troops would be remotely safe IMHO (for exactly the same reasons that only FEDERAL troops were able to achieve control without violence in the 1950's reactions to desegregation.)

Yes, the above is political. But if there is one thing we must learn very quickly to have any hope of dealing effectively with Ebola, it is that politics is a critical and key component of effectively managing epidemics (as Liberia is currently teaching us.)

As is usually the case, the RIGHT thing and the HUMANE thing to do is also the MOST EFFECTIVE thing to do as well. We must not let greed blind us to that reality.