While Sierra Leone patiently moves towards concluding a 42-day period in which it can be declared Ebola-free, a study shows that deaths continue to skyrocket in the nation not due to Ebola, but of the fear of hospitals left in its aftermath.
700 people in northern Sierra Leone have been quarantined, as the country, recently celebrating the discharge from the hospital of their last Ebola patient, diagnosed a 16-year-old girl with the disease.
A nurse employed by a health NGO who returned from work in Sierra Leone has become the first person to test positive for Ebola in Italy, officials confirmed on Wednesday.
A new study on typhoid fever, an infection spread through unsanitary food and water, and prominent in parts of Asia and Africa, has found that an antibiotic-resistant clone has begun to spread in southern Africa, threatening to reach epidemic levels.
Sierra Leone has experienced a dramatic fall in the number of Ebola cases in the nation over the past month, prompting the government to reopen schools and attempt to return civilians to normal daily life. Much has changed in the past year due to the outbreak, including the population of stray dogs, which has doubled to an estimated half a million.
Using the fear triggered by recent deaths catalyzed by superbugs as a launching pad for spending another billion dollars, the Obama administration is going to announce the spending of over $1 billion over the next five years to combat the problem of antibiotic resistance.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the medical charity that first alerted the world of the spread of Ebola, has now faulted some national governments as well as the World Health organization for ignoring the warning and throwing roadblocks in the way of eradicating the disease before it grew.
Emails obtained by the Associated Press show discussions among the senior administrators of the World Health Organization from as early as June 2014, in which officials refused to yet declare a state of emergency in west Africa over the Ebola outbreak for fear of angering local governments and interfering with the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.
As the number of cases of Ebola begin to rise for the first time in 2015, a new audit has uncovered more than $3 million in funding to fight Ebola in Sierra Leone is wholly unaccounted for. The government has vowed a prompt investigation as it begins to quarantine previously untouched neighborhoods in the capital, Freetown.
Since the Disneyland measles outbreak began in December, public health officials have called upon parents to vaccinate to vaccinate their under-immunized children and for adults to obtain a booster shot to protect against the disease. Since then, the coastal, liberal enclave of Santa Cruz has seen a significant uptick in vaccination appointments, according to local news station KSBW and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.
World Health Organization (WHO) statistics show a significant drop in cases of Ebola in Guinea, Liberia, and even beleaguered Sierra Leone, indicating a potential–though not guaranteed–end of an outbreak that has taken thousands of lives and affected millions.