Science

HUFFINGTON POST

By Sam Stein                                                              Updated Oct. 13 ,2014

BETHESDA, Md. -- As the federal government frantically works to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and as it responds to a second diagnosis of the disease at home, one of the country's top health officials says a vaccine likely would have already been discovered were it not for budget cuts.

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has "slowed down" research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.

"NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and thought, 'Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'" Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."

United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon with actor Leonardo DiCaprio during his designation ceremony as the UN Messenger of Peace. Photograph: EPA

Julian Borger - New York The Guardian
21 Sep 2014 16.55 BST

More than 140 heads of state and government fly in to New York this week for the United Nations general assembly amid apprehension that international order is unraveling at an accelerating pace, while the world's leaders seem ever less willing or able to deal with the proliferating threats.

The UN's humanitarian agencies are in danger of being completely overwhelmed by the multiple crises. Ebola is spreading rapidly across West Africa, swamping rickety national health systems and a thus-far underfunded UN effort to stop its advance. The spread of Islamic State (Isis) extremists in the Middle East, feeding on the destruction of the Syrian civil war and exposing the weakness of the Iraqi state, has similarly outpaced patchy international efforts at containment.

By Simon Engler - SEP 4, 2014 - 05:06 PM

Patrick Sawyer, Nigeria's first Ebola patient, collapsed at the international airport in Lagos on July 20. This Wednesday, more than six weeks later, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it was monitoring at least 200 Nigerians for infection related to Sawyer's case. Sawyer, a Liberian-American who had traveled from Monrovia, had carried the often-fatal disease to Africa's most populous country, hundreds of miles from its origin. It was as if he had slipped through a crowd.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/09/04/the_ebola_outbreak_is_out_of_control_can_it_be_tracked_remotely

Bloomberg School students assess Ebola interventions at outbreak epicenter.

When the Red Cross asked for help conducting Ebola-related research in Guinea, Bloomberg School doctoral students Tim Roberton and Clementine Fu immediately stepped forward. From July 19 to August 1, the two worked in the outbreak’s initial epicenter in Guéckédou, and in the capital city of Conakry.