GENEVA (AP) — The U.N. health agency says it and national authorities are investigating whether three cases of the Zika virus discovered in Guinea Bissau are of the same strain as the one behind outbreaks linked to head and brain abnormalities in Brazil and elsewhere.
A fifth person has died of Ebola in southeast Guinea since March 17, a health official told Reuters on Tuesday, raising concerns that a recent flare-up of the deadly virus could spread. The latest case was detected in Macenta prefecture, about 200 kilometers from the village of Korokpara where the four other recent Ebola-related deaths occurred, said Fode Sylla Tass, spokesman for National Coordination of the Fight against Ebola in Guinea. Burials, where bodies of the deceased are often washed, have been a main cause of transmission of Ebola, which has killed at least 11,300 people in West Africa since 2013 in the worst outbreak on record.
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Guinea has been declared free from transmission of Ebola, the World Health Organization said Tuesday, marking a milestone for the West African country where the original Ebola chain of transmission began two years ago leading to the largest epidemic in history.
An Ebola test vaccine provided blanket protection in a field trial in Guinea, researchers said, possibly heralding “the beginning of the end” for the devastating West African outbreak that has killed thousands. The serum was 100 percent effective after a week in more than 7,600 people inoculated, according to results published in The Lancet medical journal and hailed as “extremely promising” by World Health Organization (WHO) chief Margaret Chan. The world was “on the verge of an effective Ebola vaccine,” the UN's health agency said in a statement.
Ghana has halted a plan to test two Ebola vaccines in an eastern town after legislators backed local protests against the trials sparked by fears of contamination, officials said on Wednesday. The country's Food and Drugs Authority said it had begun enlisting volunteers in Hohoe in the Volta region to be injected with drugs made by Johnson & Johnson and Bavarian Nordic as part of a global Ebola vaccine drive. Ebola has killed more than 11,000 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia since it began more than a year ago but new cases have declined sharply.
On May 24 last year a pregnant woman and an older housewife staggered into Kenema hospital in eastern Sierra Leone and were diagnosed within a day as the country's first Ebola cases. Both women had attended the funeral of a widely-respected faith healer known as Mendinor, whose “powers” were renowned on both sides of Sierra Leone's border with Guinea. The grandmother, whose real name was Finda Nyuma, had been treating sick patients in her home village, a diamond-mining town just a few hours' walk from Gueckedou in Guinea, where the outbreak began in December 2013.
Crowds destroyed an Ebola facility and attacked health workers in central Guinea on rumours that the Red Cross was planning to disinfect a school, a government spokesman said on Saturday. Red Cross teams in Guinea have been attacked on average 10 times a month over the past year, the organisation said this week, warning that the violence was hampering efforts to contain the disease. During the incident on Friday in the town of Faranah, around 400 km (250 miles) east of the capital Conakry, angry residents attacked an Ebola transit centre and set ablaze a vehicle belonging to medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres. A Red Cross burial team was also targeted and forced to flee, said Fodé Tass Sylla, spokesman for the government campaign against the disease.
GUECKEDOU, Guinea (AP) — West Africa’s fight to contain Ebola has hampered the campaign against malaria, a preventable and treatable disease that is claiming many thousands more lives than the dreaded virus.