Disease

ASSOCIATED PRESS                   Oct 10, 2014, 4:36 PM ET

MONROVIA -- Liberian lawmakers on Friday rejected a proposal to grant President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf the power to further restrict movement and public gatherings and to confiscate property in the fight against Ebola. One legislator said such a law would have turned Liberia into a police state.

The proposal's defeat came as the World Health Organization once again raised the death toll attributed to the Ebola outbreak. The Geneva-based U.N. agency said that 4,033 confirmed, probable or suspected Ebola deaths have now been recorded.

Liberians stage a protest yesterrday outside the National Assembly against the government not doing enough to fight Ebola virus in Monrovia, Liberia.  (AP Photo/Abbas Dulleh)

All but nine of them were in the three worst-affected countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Eight of the rest were in Nigeria, with one patient dying in the United States....

THE WASHINGTON POST                               OCT. 10, 2014

By Todd C. Franke

... The last region in Sierra Leone untouched by Ebola sits in the rugged, mountainous north, in a place called the Koinadugu district. It is a poor place, dependent on small farms and gold mines, the largest of the country’s 14 districts by land size and home to 265,000 residents. The district borders Guinea, where the current Ebola outbreak began and first spilled over into Sierra Leone. Koinadugu is surrounded by districts dealing with hundreds of Ebola cases.

But Koinadugu has kept the virus at bay.

Momoh Konte, shown at his office in Freetown,  returned to Sierra Leone from Washington to help his home district fight against Ebola. (Photo by Tanya Bindra for The Washington Post)

It is a remarkable feat, a source of pride for district residents, a source of hope for the entire struggling nation, and a curiosity to epidemiologists tracking the worst Ebola outbreak in history...

THE WASHINGTON POST
by Joel Achenbach, Lena H. Sun and Brady Dennis         October 9

WASHINGTON---  When the experts describe the Ebola disaster, they do so with numbers. The statistics include not just the obvious ones, such as caseloads, deaths and the rate of infection, but also the ones that describe the speed of the global response.

Right now, the math still favors the virus.

Global health officials are looking closely at the “reproduction number,” which estimates how many people, on average, will catch the virus from each person stricken with Ebola. The epidemic will begin to decline when that number falls below one. A recent analysis estimated the number at 1.5 to 2.

The number of Ebola cases in West Africa has been doubling about every three weeks. There is little evidence so far that the epidemic is losing momentum.

Over 8,000 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone have been infected with Ebola, according to new data from the World Health Organization (WHO).

The numbers show there were 2,799 new cases in the last 21 days. Of the 8,011 people infected, 3,857 people have died. “The situation in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone continues to deteriorate, with widespread and persistent transmission of [Ebola],” says the WHO in a statement.

The WHO cites problems gathering data in Liberia, and says it should be emphasized that “the reported fall in the number of new cases in Liberia over the past three weeks is unlikely to be genuine. Rather, it reflects a deterioration in the ability of overwhelmed responders to record accurate epidemiological data.”