Situation Report

ASSOCIATED PRESS by MARIA CHENG and RAPHAEL SATTER   July 31, 2015

LONDON — The United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response is officially winding down Friday, handing its leadership role and senior staff to the Geneva-based World Health Organization as efforts to contain the deadly virus continue.

"We have reached an important milestone in the global Ebola response," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement Friday, while noting that that crisis "is not yet over."

The Ebola mission, also called UNMEER, was established last year as WHO struggled to get a handle on an outbreak that has killed more than 11,000 people, mainly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. WHO had been strongly criticized for fumbling its response to the epidemic, and the creation of UNMEER was widely seen as a rebuke to its leadership.

Speaking to reporters Friday, UNMEER chief David Nabarro said he had seen signs that WHO had already absorbed some of the lessons of the Ebola disaster, recovering its coordination role in West Africa and deploying more 1,000 staffers to the field.

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http://www.seattlepi.com/news/medical/article/WHO-works-to-reform-itself-after-fumbling-Ebola-6416880.php

REUTERS by Kate Kelland                     April 21, 2015

LONDON, April 21 - Genetic sequence data on two of the deadliest yet most poorly understood viruses are to be made available to researchers worldwide in real time as scientists seek to speed up understanding of Ebola and MERS infections.

The project, led by British scientists with West African and Saudi Arabian collaboration, hopes to encourage laboratories around the world to use the live data -- updated as new cases emerge -- to find new ways to diagnose and treat the killer diseases, and ideally, ultimately, prevent them.

"The collective expertise of the world's infectious disease experts is more powerful than any single lab, and the best way of tapping into this...is to make data freely available as soon as possible," said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust global health charity which is funding the work.

The gene sequences, already available for MERS cases and soon to come in the case of Ebola, will be posted on the website virological.org for anyone to see, access and use.

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http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFKBN0NC19W20150421?sp=true

BBC  by  Smitha Mundasad                                                                           March 27, 2015

A UK female military medic who has been discharged from hospital after being declared free of Ebola said it was thanks to medics that she is alive.

Anna Cross was the first person in the world to be given the experimental Ebola drug MIL 77, her doctors said.

Corporal Cross, aged 25 from Cambridge, caught the virus while working as a volunteer nurse in Sierra Leone.

Doctors at the hospital...described the drug she was given as a close relative of the medicine ZMapp and that MIL 77 was made in China...

It is too soon to know what role the drug played in Cpl Cross' recovery, they added.

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http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32088310

ASSOCIATED PRESS  by Clarence Roy-Macaulay                                                      March 12, 2015
 FREETOWN --   Sierra Leone has seen a worrying spike in confirmed Ebola cases over the past week in four districts, the head of the national Ebola response center said Thursday.

New measures must now be put into place to contain the surges, said the head of the National Ebola Response Centre, Alfred Palo Conteh.

Fifteen cases were recorded Wednesday, along with 16 on Monday and Tuesday respectively, according to Sierra Leone's Ministry of Health and Sanitation.

"We are now on a bumpy road to zero number of cases to get to President Ernest Bai Koroma's target of March 31," said Palo Conteh. "It is frustrating."

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http://news.yahoo.com/sierra-leone-sees-worrying-spike-ebola-cases-over-141214859.html;_ylt=AwrBEiTD7gJVy2QANdbQtDMD