Communication

thenewdawnliberia.com - by Ben P. Wesee - Editing by Jonathan Browne -September 1, 2015

The four Mano River Union or MRU countries – Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast have issued a joint communiqué in Monrovia, calling for information sharing, experiences and good practices during and after health emergencies in order to collaborate and network with local and international partners in the sub-region.

In a just ended conference here on the Ebola Virus Disease or EVD, the MRU countries also advanced several recommendations. Delegates from the four countries recommended in the communiqué a need to develop a harmonized framework for adherence to ethical standards during health disasters with appropriate and approved mechanisms for vaccines, therapeutic agents and testing methods.

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1:00-5:00 pm, July 8, 2015

Manhattan Room, One UN Plaza, Second Floor

44^th St. and 1^st Ave., New York City

Agenda

On Wednesday July 8, 2015, an afternoon session will address Ebola response & recovery data strengthening, situational awareness, and coordination.  This working session will be held at U.N. headquarters in New York or a facility nearby from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM.

Following are the proposed elements of the July 8 afternoon session:

1:00 PM           40 mins                        Opening Plenary Session

            An Overview of West Africa’s Current & Emerging Infrastructures

                        Barbara Bentein           UNICEF

                        Juliet Benford               Anthrologica

                        Sara Glass                   USAID, Global Development Lab

EUREAKALERT!                                                  June 15, 2015
(Scroll down for link to PLOS One article.)

ARISONA STATE UNIVERSITY --

Using Twitter and Google search trend data in the wake of the very limited U.S. Ebola outbreak of October 2014, a team of researchers from Arizona State University, Purdue University and Oregon State University have found that news media is extraordinarily effective in creating public panic.

Because only five people were ultimately infected yet Ebola dominated the U.S. media in the weeks after the first imported case, the researchers set out to determine mass media's impact on people's behavior on social media.

"Social media data have been suggested as a way to track the spread of a disease in a population, but there is a problem that in an emerging outbreak people also use social media to express concern about the situation," explains study team leader Sherry Towers of ASU's Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center. "It is hard to separate the two effects in a real outbreak situation...."

Towers states that this study will be useful in future outbreak situations because it provides valuable insight into just how strongly news media can manipulate public emotions on a topic.

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