Ebola Breakout Summary

Wendy Orent, writing this article after the Ebola outbreak, states that Ebola doesn’t have what it takes to produce a pandemic. Orent believes that there’s no way the next pandemic will spring on us, unlike the ideas of Frank Macfarlane, a virologist. Orent’s theory is that the only way a real pandemic can happen is through social conditions like refugee camps or crowded hospitals.

This book took place in the late 1980's, and it is based upon an outbreak of the Ebola virus in a monkey house located in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Reston, Virginia. The first occurrence of an Ebola-like virus (Marburg) takes place in Kenya and a French expatriate named Charles Monet is the first to die from this disease. His terrible and excruciatingly fatal death is described in the most horrific details by Preston. The hospital staff who treated Monet became infected with the virus as well, traveling fast throughout the hospital and carried on more deaths. The Marburg virus was first to explode in a vaccine factory in Germany in 1967. Over the next several chapters, the book describes outbreaks that occurred four years before Monet’s death. Preston then goes on to explaining how

There has been an acute worry roaming about the United States concerning the Ebola Outbreak. Originally, Ebola had never touched the United States until September of 2014. (4) The disease was originated from and named after a river in the Democratic of Congo. Since discovered, there have been known cases in Africa. There have been many very deadly cases of Ebola - the fatality rate is estimated to from about fifty to ninety percent. (2) To the United States, there had never been any worry about the disease until September twentieth of 2014. A man by the name of Thomas Eric Duncan boarded flight 822 from Liberia to Dallas, Texas. Flight 822 was where it all began. Nobody had any

1. On p. 16 – a hot virus from the rain forest lives within a 24 hr plane ride …

One specific trial emerging out of the 2014 Ebola outbreak is STRIVE. STRIVE stands for Sierra Leone Trial to introduce a Vaccine against Ebola. Sierra Leone is located on the west coast of Africa and is a country that was affected by the 2014 Ebola outbreak. The study of the STRIVE vaccine is said to be, “an unblinded, individually randomized trial with phased introduction of the vaccine”(www.cdc.gov). Patients were separated into two categories. One group received the vaccine immediately and were watched for six months, while about six months later, the second group received the vaccine. The groups were both observed for the amount of antibodies in their blood. A vaccine prepares the body for an infection. The vaccine is usually dead or

Chairman Jeff Flake (R-AZ), noted that World Health Organization declared that the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is no longer a global health emergency.

In the fall of 2014, an outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa spread to the United States. Panic overtook regions of the country and led to the search for uncovering the molecular biology of the disease and for finding a suitable treatment against the virus. Yasuteru Sakurai and colleagues discussed Ebola’s dependence on host calcium signaling proteins in their scientific journal article, “Two-pore channels control Ebola virus host cell entry and are drug targets for disease treatment”. In the article, the authors hypothesized that two-pore channels are good drug targets against Ebola because they help regulate entry into the host cell. They examined the mechanism of the calcium signals, the calcium channels activated by that mechanism, the effect of inhibiting those channels, and a drug that could potentially be an effective therapy.

During class, we watched the NOVA special Ebola: The Plague Fighters. This was an event that dealt with how Kikwit, a city that holds roughly 400,000 people in Zaire (which is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo). During this NOVA special, there were many examples of how humans evolve and how evolutionary processes in regards to disease and human survivorship. This essay will only talk about the few major examples that were shown which include: cultural evolution (the ability to have doctors from everywhere help, and the ability to quarantine the city) and biological evolution (how we become resistant to the ebola).

The origin of the outbreak was in a country called Guinea. Guinea is located in a continent called Africa in the Northern Hemisphere. The virus then spread to one of the countries that boarder Guinea, Sierra Lionne. After Ebola had spread to Sierra Lionne it then went further south and went to Liberia. In 2014 Sierra Lionne and Liberia became the main concentrated areas of Ebola, it also went to Nigeria and The Democratic Republic Congo. After it hit these three countries it then dispersed to 3 more continents. Ebola was Concentric in Western Africa. Ebola dispersed into different continents where the disease clustered into little groups around the world. As of September 22 2014, the outbreak had reached five African countries including Guinea,

Mickey: The government already tracks fathers who are out of work through the monthly unemployment reports. The FBI also already tracks "mentally ill people who murdered" through crime statistics on its website.

Responses to the Ebola outbreak show that the international community has yet to reach agreement on what constitutes an adequate policy response to transnational public health crises. Currently, governments are continuing to use isolation and quarantine to protect against contagious diseases. Also, they are implementing effective legally binding agreements such as the International Health Regulations which tend to improve 196 countries to respond to global public health threats. However, these measures are not sufficient against future health crises. The challenge is to change structures of power including neoliberalism, capitalism, and racism at all levels of politics and policy, which something that is largely absent from the conventional

Ebola is caused by an infection with a virus. There are five identified Ebola virus species, four of which are known to cause disease in humans: Ebola virus, Sudan virus, Taï Forest virus, and Bundibugyo virus.The fifth, Reston virus, has caused disease in nonhuman primates, but not in humans. Ebola is a disease that spread extremely fast in Guinea and all over Africa it is killing off many Africans. The first case of Ebola was in December 2013 in Guinea. People deserted hospitals and went home, fueling the rapid spread of the virus. Lagos, a city with a population of 22 million people, experienced eight Ebola deaths. A village of about 1,000 people in Sierra Leone has been placed under quarantine following the death of 67-year-old woman from

Ebola has affected many African countries such as Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. In fact, “these countries have experienced the largest known Ebola virus disease epidemic with approximately 13,000 persons infected as of October 28, 2014” (Chevalier, Chung, & Smith, 2014). Then in late September 2014, a 45-year-old male who had arrived in the United States from Liberia 5 days earlier went to a Texas emergency department. It then came to the attention that this patient had Ebola and the CDC implemented appropriate guidelines to the hospital of Texas. These guidelines were implemented in order to prevent an Ebola outbreak. In fact, everyone who was in direct contact of the patient had daily monitoring for 21 days after the exposure (Cases,

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) just got worse. In what the World Health Organization’s top response official is calling a “game changer” event, one case has now been confirmed in Mbandaka—a city of 1.2 million people about 150 kilometers from the rural rainforest area where the other confirmed Ebola cases have been found.

The Ebola virus has been in the recent news. Spoke persons: who are said to be experts have given opinions, and facts about Ebola. They have given precaution steps to be taken to contain the deadly disease and reported on the possibility of spreading of this disease. A possible epidemic in the US and/or other countries is real. All the precautions and shared information is still not enough to relieve my fear as a health care provider I would come into contact with this deadly disease.