Health - Liberia

submitted by George Hurlburt

Sierra Leonean doctors practice wearing protective clothing in the Ebola Training Academy in Freetown, Sierra Leone, December 16, 2014. Reuters

uk.reuters.com - by Kemo Cham and Emma Farge - October 21, 2015

. . . the case of Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey – the first known Ebola survivor to have an apparently life-threatening relapse – has revived concerns about the health of some 17,000 survivors in Sierra Leone, neighbouring Guinea and Liberia.

Doctors and health officials in Sierra Leone told Reuters that a handful of mystery deaths among discharged patients may also be types of Ebola relapses, stirring fear that the deadly virus may last far longer than previously thought in the body, causing other potentially lethal complications.

Diagnoses have not been made, partly because of a lack of relevant medical training and insufficient equipment for detecting a virus that can hide in inaccessible corners of the body - such as the spinal fluid or eyeball. In Cafferkey's case, the virus in her brain caused meningitis.

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Government of Liberia - Draft for Review - May 2, 2015

1.1. Purpose

The following document outlines the implementation plan for the 7-­‐year Liberia Health Workforce Program. The program theory and the corresponding activities detailed in Section 3 indicate the structure for this document, providing a coherent narrative that links seven complementary programmatic components toward a shared goal and outcomes.

This document is parallel to the structure of the corresponding budget (see Annex C), which provides a holistic view of the Health Workforce Program costs by activity and component over time, while simultaneously giving a granular view of the scale and timing of each individual budget line item and the sources and assumptions that inform them.

(SEE ATTACHMENT BELOW)

Sierra Leone health officials check people transiting at the border crossing with Liberia in Jendema in March 2015.
Photograph: Zoom Dosso/AFP/Getty Images

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine finds that if Britain had set up beds one month earlier, about 7,500 people would not have become ill

CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - Measuring the impact of Ebola control measures in Sierra Leone

theguardian.com - by Sarah Boseley - October 12, 2015

The number of Ebola cases in Sierra Leone could have been halved if treatment beds had been set up by the UK government and charities just one month earlier, a report claims.

The slow response of the World Health Organisation and others to the increasingly desperate pleas for help from people on the ground, especially Médecins sans Frontières, has attracted widespread criticism. Now researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have revealed how many could have been spared the disease if action had been taken sooner.

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submitted by George Hurlburt

Yaovi Gaffa, 20, chained in a room at a prayer camp near Lomé, Togo, in April. Chaining is a last resort for families in West Africa where psychiatry is virtually unknown. Credit Joao Silva/The New York Times

nytimes.com - by Benedict Carey - October 11, 2015

KPOVÉ, Togo — The church grounds here sprawled through a strange, dreamlike forest. More than 150 men and women were chained by the ankle to a tree or concrete block, a short walk from the central place of worship. Most were experiencing the fearsome delusions of schizophrenia.

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