Ebola, one of the deadliest known viruses, is currently spreading across western Africa. Below are articles regarding the devastation being caused by this ruthless killer -- as well as the Marburg virus.

Sierra Leone begins 3-day Ebola lockdown

By Clarence Roy-Macaulay as of 9/19/14

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) — Thousands of health workers began knocking on doors across Sierra Leone on Friday in search of hidden Ebola cases as the entire West African nation was locked down in their homes in an unprecedented effort to combat the deadly disease.

Wooden tables lay empty at the capital's usually vibrant food markets. Police stood guard at roadblocks in this nation of 6 million people. This crumbling seaside capital, its streets normally crowded with bumper-to-bumper traffic, seemed like a ghost town.

Health workers planned to give each household a bar of soap during neighborhood canvassing. Once a house is visited it is to be marked with a sticker. President Ernest Bai Koroma urged Sierra Leoneans to cooperate.

"The survival and dignity of each and every Sierra Leonean is at stake," he said Thursday night in an address to the nation.

At least 562 people are believed to have died from Ebola since the virus came to Sierra Leone from neighboring Guinea.

Authorities hope to find and isolate Ebola patients who have resisted going to health centers, often seen only as places to die. Some international health experts have warned there might not be enough beds at treatment centers for new patients found during the three-day lockdown which ends Sunday.

UNICEF said the measure provides an opportunity to tell people how to protect themselves.

"If people don't have access to the right information, we need to bring life-saving messages to them, where they live, at their doorsteps," said Roeland Monasch, UNICEF Representative in Sierra Leone. In a statement, the U.N. children's fund said the operation needs to be carried out "in a sensitive and respectful manner."

Most seemed to be taking the order seriously, and there were no immediate reports of resistance to the lockdown.

"It will protect our country from this dangerous virus," said Ishmail Bangura, a Freetown resident. "Many of our people have died — nurses and doctors too — so if they ask us to stay home for three days, for me it not bad."

However during this first-ever Ebola outbreak in West Africa, some people have previously lashed out at health workers, accusing them of bringing the dreaded disease. Others don't believe it exists. Many villagers in rural Guinea have reacted with fear and panic when outsiders conducted awareness campaigns, and this week such an encounter resulted in deaths.

Six people have been arrested in the killings of eight people in Guinea who were on an Ebola awareness campaign, the Guinean government said Friday. The team, accompanied by journalists, had gone to the village of Womey on Tuesday. Another team dispatched to look for nine missing members discovered eight bodies, including those of three local journalists, a hospital administrator and several health officials, the government said.

Only one of the missing — the son of a Womey deputy administrative official — was found alive and hiding in the area, the government statement said.

More than 2,600 people have died across West Africa, with more than half the fatalities recorded in Liberia.

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama pledged 3,000 troops and the first increased American military aid arrived in Liberia on Thursday, according to the U.S. Embassy there.

The C-17 U.S. military aircraft brought a team of seven military personnel along with some equipment. An embassy statement said more supplies and personnel are expected in the coming days.

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Associated Press writers Kabba Kargbo in Freetown, Sierra Leone; Jonathan Paye-Layleh in Monrovia, Liberia, and Boubacar Diallo in Conakry, Guinea, contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/1st-us-anti-ebola-military-aid-arrives-liberia-100005705.html

Scientists Grapple With Ethics in Rush to Release Ebola Vaccines

By Kate Kelland of Rueters 9/29/14

LONDON (Reuters) - Normally it takes years to prove a new vaccine is both safe and effective before it can be used in the field. But with hundreds of people dying a day in the worst ever outbreak of Ebola, there is no time to wait.

In an effort to save lives, health authorities are determined to roll out potential vaccines within months, dispensing with some of the usual testing, and raising unprecedented ethical and practical questions.

"Nobody knows yet how we will do it. There are lots of tough real-world deployment issues and nobody has the full answers yet," said Adrian Hill, who is conducting safety trials on healthy volunteers of an experimental Ebola shot developed by GlaxoSmithKline.

Hill, a professor and director at the Jenner Institute at Britain's University of Oxford, says that if his results show no adverse side-effects, GSK's new shot could used in people in West Africa by the end of this year.

Even if a drug is shown to be safe, it takes longer to prove it is effective - time that is simply not available when cases of Ebola infection are doubling every few weeks and projected by the World Health Organization to reach 20,000 by November.

Among questions that scientists are grappling with: should an unproven vaccine be given to everybody, or just a few? Should it be offered to healthcare workers first? The young before the old? Should it be used first in Liberia where Ebola is spreading fastest, or Guinea where it is closer to being under control?

Should people be told to assume it will protect them from Ebola? Or should they take all the protective measures they would if they hadn't been vaccinated? And if so, how will anyone know whether the vaccine works?

GSK is one of several drug firms that have either started or announced plans for human trials of candidate Ebola vaccines. Others include Johnson & Johnson, NewLink, Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Profectus Biosciences.

The WHO says it hopes to see small-scale use of the first experimental Ebola vaccines in the West Africa outbreak by January next year.

It has convened vaccine specialists, epidemiologists, pharmaceutical companies and ethicists, for a meeting on Monday and Tuesday to discuss the moral and practical issues.

"Normally safety is the absolutely paramount thing when you're developing a new vaccine, but this time we're going to have to take more risks," said Brian Greenwood, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who will take part in the WHO-led meeting.

"Quite how we do that, and what risks we take, hasn't really been thought through yet. That's what people are trying to figure out."

TWO THINGS AT THE SAME TIME

The chaos caused by the epidemic itself makes it even more difficult to deploy and track use of a new vaccine, said Hill.

"You're trying to do two things at the same time: you're trying to evaluate a vaccine and deploy it - when normally you would evaluate the vaccine first, by doing a randomized double blind controlled trial, and then you'd deploy it if it was shown to be safe and effective."

Because Ebola virus is so deadly, those who receive a trial vaccine must be told to take all other precautions and protect themselves fully. This could make it harder for researchers to decipher whether the protective clothing and safety protocols, or the new vaccine, is what kept them safe.

Normally researchers testing a vaccine would give some volunteers a placebo, or dummy, to create a "control" group to compare against those who get the real drug. That seems unthinkable in a situation where disease with a death rate of up to 90 percent is raging through villages.

"Would it be ethical to do a trial where some people don't get the vaccine because they are in the control group? Most people think it wouldn't be - especially if you have reasonable evidence that the vaccine might work," said Hill.

Jeremy Farrar, an infectious diseases expert and director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity, said limited supplies of any candidate vaccine could result in a form of natural control group being formed anyway. Researchers can compare populations where the vaccine is available with those where it isn't.

GSK has said it is aiming to have 10,000 doses of its experimental shot by the end of the year, while Canada has given 800 vials of the NewLink candidate vaccine to the WHO, expected to yield at least 1,500 doses.

Most experts interviewed by Reuters favor the idea of the first doses going to frontline healthcare workers, since their exposure to risk is so high. Researchers could then compare infection rates among health workers who receive the vaccine to those working in regions still waiting for it.

Peter Piot, a co-discoverer of the Ebola virus in 1976 and now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said that however complicated the ethics, reverting to the traditional years-long process of testing vaccines, and withholding them from West Africa until then, is not an option.

"It may be that without a vaccine, we can't really stop this epidemic," he said.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Peter Graff)

http://news.msn.com/science-technology/scientists-grapple-with-ethics-in-rush-to-release-ebola-vaccines

First Ebola, Now Marburg. How Do We Stop Future Outbreaks?

By Ryan Wallace, October 9, 2014

Marburg, a virus similar to Ebola, has hit the radar in the African country of Uganda, raising concerns about another deadly outbreak. With two lethal viruses threatening public health, many are questioning why these contagions seem to be flaring up more often — and more important, what we can do to avoid them in the future.

The current Ebola outbreak originated in West Africa and has killed more than 3,800 people, more than all other past outbreaks combined. The first Marburg death was confirmed recently in Kampala, Uganda. Both viruses cause hemorrhagic fevers and are passed from animals to humans, which has experts examining how humans and African wildlife interact.

One mystery surrounding these viruses is where they live between outbreaks, when they aren't infecting humans, author and Ebola expert David Quammen told National Geographic. For example, health officials know Ebola likely goes dormant in an animal, called its "reservoir host," but they have yet to identify exactly which species. At least one of the suspects is the fruit bat, which is believed to host several other viruses (including Marburg and SARS) without getting sick. These bats usually live in large, tightly packed groups, allowing the virus to spread easily among the animals.

In the past, there was enough room in Africa for humans and fruit bats to exist without much contact. Deforestation has changed this, according to an editorial in the Guardian. West Africa was once covered in rain forests, a common habitat for fruit bats. During the past decade, loggers have stripped the land, reducing the habitable area for the animals. Laws governing more responsible logging practices in that part of the world could help reduce the risk of future outbreaks, but civil wars and political corruption are slowing progress.

As the forests shrink, the mining industry has been moving more people into Africa to tap its vast mineral reserves. These miners often have to travel through high concentrations of bats, which increases the likelihood of someone being infected. Like the rain forests, mines are also popular habitats for animals that might carry these viruses, and miners have been among the victims in several Marburg outbreaks in the past. In 1998, one of the largest Marburg outbreaks to date occurred in Congo, in an area pocked with several illegal gold mines. During the course of the epidemic, there were 149 cases and 123 deaths. 

But animals in the wild are not the only threat to spread these viruses; wild animals — including primates, birds, and reptiles — captured and sold for food or as exotic pets are also a risk. Some experts believe the illegal wildlife trade market — which brings in between $10 billion and $20 billion each year — is one of the greatest threats due to its global reach and the lack of health standards. "As wildlife is traded between hunters, middle marketers, and consumers, there are, quite literally, billions of opportunities for disease transmission among wildlife, humans, and domestic animals," wrote Timothy Bouley and Sara Thompson for the World Bank. Research has found that outbreaks resulting from wildlife trade have caused hundreds of billions of dollars of economic damage globally. It has been such a problem the researchers suggested that eradicating the illegal trade market would be more practical and effective at stopping outbreaks than attacking the virus directly.

https://www.yahoo.com/health/first-ebola-now-marburg-how-do-we-stop-future-99548432852.html