March 21, 2015 - SIERRA LEONE
- Despite recent gains in battling Ebola, Sierra Leone's government
today announced a new quarantine for the western part of the country, a
move that it says could help meet a mid-April goal of eliminating the
disease.
In other developments, more US health workers were
evacuated from Sierra Leone amid new details about how they may have
been exposed to the virus, and a vaccine expert pushed for governments
and donors to pull together to develop vaccines against Ebola and other
emerging disease threats.
Lockdown ordered for Mar 27-29
Palo
Conteh, head of Sierra Leone's National Ebola Response Centre, said the
lockdown will be conducted from Mar 27 to 29, similar to one it
conducted in September, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported today.
Last
fall the government ordered a nationwide lockdown to help outbreak
responders go door to door to identify people with symptoms and provide
information about the disease. The step was criticized by some as likely
to do more harm than good.
The new quarantine will affect about
2.5 million people in western Sierra Leone, where most of the country's
cases are still being reported, according to the AFP report. The area
includes Freetown and Bombali and Port Loko districts to the north.
In
mid-February, leaders from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone met and
set a goal of reducing cases to zero in 60 days, which United Nations
Ebola response leaders said at the time would be extremely difficult.
Since
then, cases have dramatically tapered off in Liberia, and Sierra Leone
has made notable progress against the disease. However, Guinea—a country
that has seen the disease rebound several times—last week reported its
highest number of cases so far the year, according to a World Health
Organization (WHO) update yesterday.
More aid workers return to US for monitoring
Meanwhile,
two more American health workers who were potentially exposed to Ebola
in Sierra Leone have been flown back to the United States for
monitoring, raising the total to 17 over the past week, the Associated
Press (AP) reported today, citing an official from the US Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The two latest workers flown
home are considered at low risk and will spend the 21-day monitoring
period in their homes, according to the report.
Several of the
others have been positioned near specialized treatment centers, and so
far only one of them has been placed in a biocontainment unit. He or she
is a patient at Nebraska Medical Center who developed symptoms on Mar
15 but was better the next day, hospital officials said.
The
hospital said today that the individual is now out of the biocontainment
unit and has returned to active monitoring along with four others who
were potentially exposed in Sierra Leone.
The exposures are linked
to teams working in Sierra Leone for Partners in Health (PIH), a
Boston-based aid group. A physician working with PIH in Sierra Leone was
sickened by Ebola and is being treated at the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., where he is in critical
condition.
PIH said yesterday that four clinicians who arrived
back in the United States on Mar 17 for active monitoring may have been
exposed while helping one of their Sierra Leonean clinician colleagues,
who later tested positive for Ebola. The clinician from Sierra Leone is
being treated at a specialized health facility run by the British
military.
PIH said the four workers exposed to the Sierra Leonean
clinician were transferred as a precaution, and none have shown
symptoms. The group added that none of 10 clinicians who cared for the
sick US doctor and were brought back for monitoring have tested positive
for Ebola.
Sharing vaccine development risk
Though
the world has had ample time to develop an Ebola vaccine, one wasn't
ready in time to help battle West Africa's outbreak, because it was too
financially risky, Seth Berkley, MD, chief executive of the GAVI
Alliance (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), said yesterday
in a
Nature editorial. Instead of blaming industry for not
developing a vaccine that has little market, governments, public
funders, and private donors should step up and invest in Ebola vaccines,
he added.
Berkley urged groups to work on a strategy to quickly
produce and distribute adequate quantities of effective vaccines when an
outbreak of Ebola or any other infectious disease occurs. He said the
first step is to invest in surveillance systems that can pinpoint the
biggest threats and new threats.
He also said having a generic
vector tested and prepared in advance that can deliver new vaccines in a
new outbreak could help tackle a range of diseases. For example, he
noted the four of the five Ebola vaccines in development use vectors
that have been developed and tested for HIV.
"It demands a
different attitude to disease control. We need to stop waiting until we
see evidence of a disease becoming a global threat before we treat it
like one," Berkley wrote. "Governments and donors need to invest in
public-health capability, and they need to take on more of the risk of
investing in vaccine development."
Case count rises
In
other developments, the World Health Organization (WHO) said the totals
in the Ebola outbreak have grown to 24,743 confirmed, probable, and
suspected illnesses and 10,216 deaths.
The latest numbers include
data as of Mar 17 for all three countries. Today's tally reflects an
increase of 77 confirmed, probable, and suspected cases and 37 deaths
since the WHO's update yesterday. -
CIDRAP.