Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Without a Vaccine, Ebola might not be stopped: Dr. Piot

  1. CONAKRY, Guinea (AP) — A Red Cross team was attacked while collecting bodies ...
  2. Red Cross Team Attacked While Burying Ebola Dead
    ABC News - 16 hours ago
  3. Red Cross team attacked while burying Ebola dead | www.ajc.com
    Atlanta Journal-Constitution - 16 hours ago
     
    partial quote:
    It may be that without a vaccine, we may not be able to stop this epidemic," Dr. Peter Piot,
     director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a co-discoverer of Ebola,
     told a news conference this week. "In this outbreak, we are reaching the limit of what classic 
     containment measures can achieve." 

    end partial quote from:
     
    longer partial quote from same article:

    "There's not a lot of diseases that can be transmitted by corpses," she said. "It's hard for people to comprehend that the dead body is actually a threat."
    Ebola is spread by bodily fluids including sweat and corpses are particularly infectious.
    The handling of dead bodies is deeply personal and rooted in tradition, especially in many parts of West Africa where the washing of bodies is common. It is often the teams trying to prevent those practices that have been targeted, said Carpentier. Much of the resistance is in remote, insular areas.
    "It has gotten better," he said. "The problem is it has to be 100 percent" or the virus will persist.
    The conventional methods used to control Ebola — isolating sick people and tracing all their contacts — are buckling under the sheer size of the outbreak. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization offered hope that there may soon be another way to control the disease, saying there may be sufficient quantities of a vaccine by the end of the year to have some impact on the outbreak.
    That would make this the first Ebola outbreak to be tackled with vaccines or medicines in the nearly 40 years since the disease was discovered. Because Ebola only pops up sporadically, there has been little incentive to develop any drug or vaccine; most of the promising candidates have been largely funded by governments.
    "It may be that without a vaccine, we may not be able to stop this epidemic," Dr. Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a co-discoverer of Ebola, told a news conference this week. "In this outbreak, we are reaching the limit of what classic containment measures can achieve."

    end longer partial quote from:

    I think I completely agree with the assessment that it is very unlikely that this Ebola outbreak can
    be stopped in Western Africa without a vaccine  because getting Ebola from a dead person goes against 
    what these people believe. It is why they are killing Red Cross and other health care workers
    because what is happening makes no sense at all to these people.  So, if you could vaccinate everyone you might be able to prevent this from Spreading all over Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the rest of this world.
     

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