Ending Ebola in '15 Depends on Locals as Much as Foreign Aid

[cronus]

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/ ... d-28121449

Ending Ebola in '15 Depends on Locals as Much as Foreign Aid

Sierra Leone rang in the new year without the usual midnight festivities on its beaches in the steamy capital. Instead, the president urged the nation to stay at home, fast and pray that the plague of Ebola will finally end in West Africa.

"Our national New Year's resolution for 2015 is surely we must defeat Ebola, and to snuff out this vile and ungodly disease," says retired Maj. Alfred Palo Conteh, who is heading the country's National Ebola Response Center.

Whether the world's worst-ever Ebola outbreak can be wiped out in West Africa in 2015 is uncertain. To a large extent, it depends as much on locals changing their practices and beliefs as it does on continued international assistance.

The World Health Organization now says there are enough beds to isolate and treat Ebola patients, but not all are in the hotspots where the disease is spreading fastest. The United Nations estimates that the number of scientists needed to track the outbreak must be tripled.

WHO is also working to speed testing of experimental Ebola vaccines but even if an effective shot is found, it would still take months to ramp up production.

One of the biggest problems is finding all contacts of confirmed cases. Teams are in place in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone ? the three worst-hit countries ? to monitor suspect cases, but too little is known about where the virus is spreading. Typically, every confirmed Ebola case has about 12 to 20 possible contacts who must be monitored. In Sierra Leone, the epicenter of the current crisis, officials are reporting just eight, leading to suspicions that contact tracing is inadequate.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon previously said the epidemic could be over by mid-2015 but WHO is now declining to set a specific timeline after having been burned on previous predictions. Last October, WHO expected that all Ebola patients and safely bury all victims by Jan. 1, but neither goal was met.

(continued, slow burn till the 2020s and the Global Ebola Pandemic decade?)

[JimC]

the president urged the nation to stay at home, fast and pray that the plague of Ebola will finally end in West Africa.

"Our national New Year's resolution for 2015 is surely we must defeat Ebola, and to snuff out this vile and ungodly disease," says retired Maj. Alfred Palo Conteh, who is heading the country's National Ebola Response Center.

Oh fuck. Proof that the worst disease introduced by Europeans was christianity...