Anywhere from 550,000 and 1.4 million people could have been infected by Ebola by the middle of January, warns the CDC. VOA reports:
The top range of the estimate, 1.4 million, assumes that the number of cases officially cited so far, 5,864 according to the count kept by the World Health Organization, is significantly underreported, and that it is likely that 2.5 times as many cases, or nearly 20,000, have in fact occurred.
CDC emphasized that the projections, based on an epidemiological model that takes into account how many people each Ebola patient eventually infects as well as other factors, is based on data available in August. They therefore do not account for the recently announced U.S. government Ebola relief effort, which includes sending 3,000 members of the armed forces to the Ebola-stricken region.
“Extensive, immediate actions – such as those already started – can bring the epidemic to a tipping point to start a rapid decline in cases,” CDC said in a statement.
The agency’s best-case model projects that by getting 70 percent of patients into facilities where the risk for transmission is reduced and burying the dead safely, the epidemic would be “almost ended” by January 20.
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Spotlight on PSI
The PSI blog highlights a recent talk that looks at the role of local businesses in reducing maternal mortality.
Women turn to both public and private providers for maternity services, and providers come in many shapes and sizes, as illustrated by the gallery above.
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine conducted the largest-ever analysis of where women are seeking family planning, antenatal care and labor and delivery services. The study took place with the support of Merck for Mothers, a PSI partner, and together with the World Bank they’re hosting a UNGA week session to explore the role of local businesses – small retail outlets selling pharmaceuticals, small private clinics, visiting nurses, midwives and more – in reducing maternal mortality.
Watch the discussion here.
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Global Health and Development Beat
In another projection of Ebola cases published on Tuesday, a WHO panel of experts warn that it may become endemic if the current response is maintained.
UNFPA’s Dr Babatunde Osotimehin said over the past 20 years,” we have seen the rise of hundreds of millions out of poverty, gender parity in primary education, fewer women dying giving life and more women in the workforce.”
A £12 million fund to support small, grassroots organisations that are defending sexual and reproductive health and rights was launched in New York, featuring backing from Denmark and the Netherlands.
IPS reports on how SMS messaging is helping to prevent maternal deaths in Cameroon.
A clinical trial of a prototype for a Ebola treatment will launch with the backing of the British bio-medical research charity Welcome Trust.
Sanitation infrastructure in India’s sprawling slums belies the official story that the country is well on its way to providing universal access to safe, clean drinking water.
Liberia has been the hardest hit country in West Africa’s Ebola outbreak with more than three-thousand cases. Fourteen of the country’s fifteen counties have been affected.
The United Nations refugee agency said it was making contingency plans for all 400,000 inhabitants of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani to flee into Turkey to escape advancing Islamic State militants.
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Buzzing in the Blogs
An editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine calls for immediate action on the West Africa Ebola outbreak and some lessons to take forward. An excerpt:
The current Ebola epidemic highlights three transformations required in our approach to rapidly emerging public health emergencies.
First, in today’s world, it’s important to recognize that if certain conditions are met — biologic shifts in a pathogen, changes in the interactions between humans and our environment, dysfunctional and underresourced health systems, national and international indifference, lack of effective timely response, high population mobility, local customs that can exacerbate morbidity and mortality, spread in densely populated urban centers, and a lack of trust in authorities — what might once have been a limited outbreak can become a massive, nearly uncontrollable epidemic.
Second, classic “outbreak control” efforts are no longer sufficient for an epidemic of this size. Rather, what’s required is a large-scale, coordinated humanitarian, social, public health, and medical response, combining classic public health measures with safe and effective interventions including behavioral changes, therapies, and when possible, vaccination. An appropriate response, moreover, requires an appreciation of the culture of the societies in the affected countries and deployment of interventions with the population’s consent. Development of interventions in collaboration with the affected communities and rebuilding of trust will be essential to their success. And these integrated efforts will need to be accompanied by much better coordination and real-time, open sharing of information across diverse disciplines and with all the players involved, from civil society, national governments, nongovernmental organizations, and academic institutions to regional and international organizations and, when appropriate, the military.
Third, the development of diagnostic tools, therapies, and vaccines (at least up through the acquisition of phase 1 safety data) for these relatively rare but inevitable and potentially devastating epidemic diseases must be prioritized during interepidemic periods, with an accepted, preapproved, and ethical mechanism for accelerating development and testing such interventions when epidemic situations arise. We believe that in this epidemic, we are reaching the limit of what classic containment can achieve.
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Capital Events
Wednesday
3:00 PM – What’s Youth Got to Do With It? Investing in Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health – Wilson Center
Thursday
9:30 AM – Pakistan: Importing Americas’s Federalism? – Atlantic Council
12:00 PM – The Impact of Secondary Schooling in Kenya: A regression Discontinuity Analysis – CGD
Friday
12:30 PM – Guns, Drugs and Military Aid: Exploring Unintended Effects of US Policy in Latin America – CGD
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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Disclaimer: Opinions presented in this email do not necessarily reflect the views of PSI.
