Last Thursday, authorities confirmed that the disease had spread to Mali, the sixth west African country affected, and on the same day a new case was confirmed in New York, in a doctor recently returned from Guinea.
Mali had long been considered highly vulnerable to the disease, since it shares a border with Guinea. The disease arrived there in a two-year-old, who travelled from Guinea with her grandmother by bus and died yesterday.
The toddler, who was bleeding from her nose during the journey, might have had high-risk contact with many people, the WHO warned. So far, 43 people are being monitored in isolation for signs of the disease, and the WHO said authorities are continuing to look for more people at risk.
To help fight Ebola, the UN humanitarian flight service airlifted about a ton of medical supplies to Mali late yesterday. The seats of the plane were removed to make room for the cargo, which included hazard suits for health workers, surgical gloves, face shields and buckets.
"Speed is of the essence. Agencies such as WFP and WHO are working every hour to confront together the virus as a matter of priority," said Denise Brown, the regional director for the UN food agency.
Meanwhile colleagues of the American doctor who caught Ebola while treating patients in Guinea say he was a hard worker who conscientiously followed safety procedures.
Dr Craig Spencer is being treated in New York after coming down with a fever on Thursday, about a week after he returned from Guinea. The 33-year-old was working at a Medecins Sans Frontieres clinic in Gueckedou, in southeastern Guinea, according to two members of the clinic's staff.
The staffers - a hygienist and a social worker - spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to the press.
Gueckedou is the epicentre of the current Ebola outbreak. The first cases were reported in that region in March, and the epidemic has since grown into the largest ever outbreak of Ebola, with more than 10,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths, according to figures released by WHO yesterday.
"We are demoralised and saddened by what's happened to Craig," said the social worker, who supports patients during what is typically a gruelling and frightening illness. "He did excellent work."
Spencer's work included direct contact with sick people: taking their temperature, following the evolution of their cases, taking their vital signs and ensuring the clinic was properly maintained, he said.
"I'm asking myself how he got the virus because he was a rigorous man," added the hygienist, whose job is to clean patients, who often have severe diarrhoea and are vomiting and bleeding profusely.
Medecins Sans Frontieres has been a major provider of care during the current Ebola outbreak and in all recent ones. Its procedures for everything from how clinics should be set up to how doctors and nurses should take off protective equipment are considered the gold standard when dealing with Ebola.
But Medecins Sans Frontieres has warned that no matter how careful health workers are, the risk can never be zero. Both workers said they thought the Gueckedou clinic is well maintained, with nothing taken for granted.
The hygienist said: "We are praying for Craig and for ourselves because we rub shoulders with death every day."
Sunday Independent
Related.....
Ebola vaccine went untested in humans for years
GALVESTON, Texas — Almost a decade ago, scientists from Canada and the United States reported that they had created a vaccine that was 100 percent effective in protecting monkeys against the Ebola virus. The results were published in a respected journal, and health officials called them exciting.
The researchers said tests in people might start within two years, and a product could potentially be ready for licensing by 2010 or 2011.
It never happened. The vaccine sat on a shelf. Only now is it undergoing the most basic safety tests in humans — with nearly 5,000 people dead from Ebola and an epidemic raging out of control in West Africa.
Its development stalled in part because Ebola is rare, and until now outbreaks had infected only a few hundred people at a time. But experts also acknowledge that the lack of follow-up on such a promising candidate reflects a broader failure to produce medicines and vaccines for diseases that afflict poor countries. Most drug companies have resisted spending the enormous sums needed to develop products useful mostly to countries with little ability to pay.
Now, as the growing epidemic devastates West Africa and is seen as a potential threat to other regions as well, governments and aid groups have begun to open their wallets. A flurry of research to test drugs and vaccines is underway, with studies starting for several candidates, including the vaccine produced nearly a decade ago.
A federal official said in an interview Thursday that two large studies involving thousands of patients were planned to begin soon in West Africa, and were expected to be described Friday by the World Health Organization.
With no vaccines or proven drugs available, the stepped up efforts are a desperate measure to stop a disease that has defied traditional means of containing it.
“There’s never been a big market for Ebola vaccines,” said Thomas W. Geisbert, an Ebola expert here at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and one of the developers of the vaccine that worked in monkeys. “So big pharma, who are they going to sell it to?”
The Ebola vaccine on which Geisbert collaborated is made from another virus, vesicular stomatitis virus, which causes a mouth disease in cattle but rarely infects people.
The vaccine was produced in Winnipeg by the Public Health Agency of Canada. The Canadian government patented it, and 800 to 1,000 vials of the vaccine were produced.
The Canadian government donated the existing vials to the World Health Organization, and safety tests of the vaccine in volunteers have begun.
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