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Iraqi media says ISIS militants have contracted Ebola

1 Jan

What’s to keep ISIS from taking advantage of this and spreading the disease to the U.S.?

Fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Islamic State group parade in Raqqa, Syria.

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Reports that Islamic State militants in Mosul have contracted Ebola swirled though Iraqi media sources on Wednesday. World Health Organization officials said they haven’t confirmed the cases, but the organization has reached out to offer assistance.

Three outlets reported that Ebola showed up at a hospital in Mosul, a city 250 miles north of Baghdad that’s been under ISIS control since June 2014. The reports, however, have perpetuated mostly in pro-government and Kurdish media.

“We have no official notification from [the Iraqi government] that it is Ebola,”

“We have no official notification from [the Iraqi government] that it is Ebola,” Christy Feig, WHO’s director of communications told Mashable.

Feig added that WHO is in the process of reaching out to government officials in Iraq to see if they need help investigating the cases, a task that could be a challenge, given the restrictions that would come with operating in ISIS-controlled territory.

It’s unclear if any disease experts or doctors in Mosul are even able to test for the Ebola virus. A Kurdish official, who was convinced the cases are Ebola, told the Kurdish media outlet Xendan that the militants’ symptoms were similar to those of the Ebola virus.

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However, Ebola symptoms — nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding and bruising — are also similar to those associated with a number of other diseases, including malaria, Lassa fever, yellow fever viruses and the Marburg virus. Also, most confirmed Ebola cases in this recent outbreak have originated in West Africa.

Citing an unnamed source in a Mosul hospital, Iraq’s official pro-government newspaper, al Sabaah, said the disease arrived in Mosul from “terrorists” who came “from several countries” and Africa.

While ISIS has recruited foreign fighters, very few of them — if any at all — are believed to have traveled from West Africa.

While ISIS has recruited foreign fighters, very few of them — if any at all — are believed to have traveled from West Africa.

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The majority of the Islamic State’s African fighters came from Tunisia, according to a Washington Post report. Others came from Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Algeria, Sudan and Somalia — none of which reported any Ebola cases in 2014.

If the cases in Mosul turn out to be Ebola — a scenario that, at this point, seems highly unlikely — it would mark the first time the virus had been detected in an area controlled by ISIS, a group that doesn’t embrace science and modern medicine.

Over the past few weeks, militants affiliated with ISIS have executed more than a dozen doctors in Mosul, according to Benjamin T. Decker, an intelligence analyst with the Levantine Group, a Middle East-based geopolitical risk and research consultancy.

“U.N. workers have thus far been prohibited from entering ISIS-controlled territory in both Iraq and Syria,” Decker, who specializes in Iraq, told Mashable.

“In this context,” he said, “the lack of medical infrastructure, supplies and practitioners in the city suggests that the outbreak could quickly lead to further infection of both ISIS fighters and residents of Mosul.”

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Scientists try to predict number of US Ebola cases

2 Nov
Nov 1, 10:41 PM EDT

Didn’t the president tell us to trust the science in this case?

By MARTHA MENDOZA AP National Writer
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STANFORD, Calif. (AP) — Top medical experts studying the spread of Ebola say the public should expect more cases to emerge in the United States by year’s end as infected people arrive here from West Africa, including American doctors and nurses returning from the hot zone and people fleeing from the deadly disease.

But how many cases?

No one knows for sure how many infections will emerge in the U.S. or anywhere else, but scientists have made educated guesses based on data models that weigh hundreds of variables, including daily new infections in West Africa, airline traffic worldwide and transmission possibilities.

This week, several top infectious disease experts ran simulations for The Associated Press that predicted as few as one or two additional infections by the end of 2014 to a worst-case scenario of 130.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a huge outbreak here, no,” said Dr. David Relman, a professor of infectious disease, microbiology and immunology at Stanford University’s medical school. “However, as best we can tell right now, it is quite possible that every major city will see at least a handful of cases.”

Relman is a founding member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advisory board for biosecurity and chairs the National Academy of Sciences forum on microbial threats.

Until now, projections published in top medical journals by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control have focused on worst-case scenarios for West Africa, concluding that cases in the U.S. will be episodic, but minimal. But they have declined to specify actual numbers.

The projections are complicated, but Ebola has been a fairly predictable virus – extremely infectious, contagious only through contact with body fluids, requiring no more than 21 days for symptoms to emerge. Human behavior is far less predictable – people get on airplanes, shake hands, misdiagnose, even lie.

Pandemic risk expert Dominic Smith, a senior manager for life risks at Newark, California-based RMS, a leading catastrophe-modeling firm, ran a U.S. simulation this week that projected 15 to 130 cases between now and the end of December. That’s less than one case per 2 million people.

Smith’s method assumes that most cases imported to the U.S. will be American medical professionals who worked in West Africa and returned home.

Smith said the high end may be a bit of an overestimate as it does not include the automatic quarantining measures that some areas in the U.S. are implementing.

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Those quarantines “could both reduce the number of contacts for imported cases, as well as increase the travel burden on – and perhaps reduce the number of – U.S. volunteers planning to support the effort in West Africa,” he said.

In a second simulation, Northeastern University professor Alessandro Vespignani projected between one case – the most likely scenario – and a slim chance of as many as eight cases though the end of November.

“I’m always trying to tell people to keep calm and keep thinking rationally,” said Vespignani, who projects the spread of infectious diseases at the university’s Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-Technical Systems.

In an article in the journal PLOS ONE, Vespignani and a team of colleagues said the probability of international spread outside the African region is small, but not negligible. Longer term, they say international dissemination will depend on what happens in West Africa in the next few months.

Their first analysis, published Sept. 2, proved to be accurate when it included the U.S. among 30 countries likely to see some Ebola cases. They projected one or two infections in the U.S., but there could be as many as 10.

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So far, nine Ebola patients have been treated in the U.S., and one has died. Seven became infected in West Africa, including Thomas Eric Duncan, the first to arrive undiagnosed and the first to die. He was cared for at a Dallas hospital, where two of his nurses were also infected.

Duncan, who was initially misdiagnosed and sent home from the emergency room, is Vespignani’s worst-case scenario for the U.S.

A similar situation, if left unchecked, could lead to a local cluster that could infect, on the outside, as many as 20, he said.

The foreseeable future extends only for the next few months. After that, projections depend entirely on what happens in West Africa. One scenario is that the surge in assistance to the region brings the epidemic under control and cases peter out in the U.S. A second scenario involves Ebola spreading unchecked across international borders.

“My worry is that the epidemic might spill into other countries in Africa or the Middle East, and then India or China. That could be a totally different story for everybody,” Vespignani said.

Dr. Ashish Jha, a Harvard University professor and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said he’s not worried about a handful of new cases in the U.S. His greatest worry is if the disease goes from West Africa to India.

“If the infection starts spreading in Delhi or Mumbai, what are we going to do?”

Dr. Peter Hotez, founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, pegs the range of cases in the U.S. between five and 100.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention prefers not to focus on a particular number. But spokeswoman Barbara Reynolds said Ebola will not be a widespread threat as some outside the agency have warned.

“We’re talking about clusters in some places but not outbreaks,” she said.

The CDC is using modeling tools to work on projections in West Africa, but “there isn’t enough data available in the U.S. to make it worthwhile to go through the exercise.”

University of Texas integrative biology professor Lauren Ancel Meyers said there are inherent inconsistencies in forecasting “because the course of action we’re taking today will impact what happens in the future.”

Her laboratory is running projections of Ebola’s spread in West Africa.

The U.S. simulations run for the AP had fairly consistent results with each other, she said. And they are “consistent with what we know about the disease.”

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Mark Caserta: President failed to be proactive in dealing with Ebola

30 Oct

ebola 8ebola 6QUARANTINE

Oct. 30, 2014 @ 12:24 AM

The Obama administration has consistently demonstrated an inability to proactively think a policy through its unintended consequences. And any “common sense” option seems always to be circumvented for the purpose of protecting this president politically. The reaction to the Ebola outbreak has been no different.

Common sense dictates containing the Ebola virus at its source until it can be eradicated. But with an estimated 150 people traveling to the United States each day from West Africa, travel restrictions alone would be insufficient since there are no direct, non-stop commercial flights from countries hardest hit by the virus to any U.S. airport. All new visas to the U.S. for citizens of Ebola-stricken nations would need to be banned until the outbreak has been controlled period.

And as fear of an outbreak in the U.S. escalates, the idea of such a travel ban is gaining momentum among House and Senate Republicans.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, became the latest Republican lawmaker to announce plans to introduce a measure that would temporarily ban new visas for people from the countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The bill, which Rubio plans to introduce when the Senate returns after the Nov. 4 mid-term elections, would go into effect immediately and continue until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention certifies that the outbreak has been contained. It could also be expanded to any future countries experiencing an outbreak of the virus.

But at this point, these precautions are like closing the barn door after the horses have bolted. The Obama administration has mishandled the Ebola situation from the very beginning.

The first Ebola patient, a teenage boy now known as “patient zero,” was identified in the West African country of Guinea way back in December 6, 2013. The boy died from the disease.

By March 24, 2014, authorities in Guinea reported 87 suspected cases of Ebola. Soon after, Liberia and Sierra Leone began reporting cases of the dreadful disease. By late September Ebola was reported as “out of control” in West Africa and “unprecedented” in its scope.

But even by Sept. 16, when Obama reassured Americans the chances of an Ebola outbreak in the U.S. were “extremely low,” he had incredulously failed to institute any travel restrictions from infected regions.

Finally, amid increasing pressure, President Obama instituted restrictions for travelers flying into the U.S. from the heavily impacted West African countries. Beginning last Wednesday passengers will be funneled through international airports in New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago and Newark, New Jersey. These five airports will reportedly have specialized Ebola screening steps.

In preparation, Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey announced last week a joint policy mandating a 21-day quarantine for anyone flying into their states after having contact with Ebola sufferers in West Africa.

But President Obama should have been more proactive in his approach to dealing with this deadly disease. His hesitation to act has needlessly placed Americans at risk. One can only pray this doesn’t end in catastrophe for Americans.

Mark Caserta is a conservative blogger, a Cabell County resident and a regular contributor to The Herald-Dispatch editorial page.

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OBAMA URGES STATES TO REVERSE MANDATORY QUARANTINES

27 Oct

Under Pressure, Cuomo Says Ebola Quarantines Can Be Spent at Home

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By MATT FLEGENHEIMER, MICHAEL D. SHEAR and MICHAEL BARBAROOCT. 26, 2014

Facing fierce resistance from the White House and medical experts to a strict new mandatory quarantine policy, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Sunday night that medical workers who had contact with Ebola patients in West Africa but did not show symptoms of the disease would be allowed to remain at home and would receive compensation for lost income.

Mr. Cuomo’s decision capped a frenzied weekend of behind-the-scenes pleas from administration officials, who urged him and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey to reconsider the mandatory quarantine they had announced on Friday. Aides to President Obama also asked other governors and mayors to follow a policy based on science, seeking to stem a steady movement toward more stringent measures in recent days at the state level.

The announcement by Mr. Cuomo seemed intended to draw a sharp contrast — both in tone and in fact — to the policy’s implementation in New Jersey, where a nurse from Maine who arrived on Friday from Sierra Leone was swiftly quarantined in a tent set up inside a Newark hospital, with a portable toilet but with no shower.

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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, left, and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York on Sunday. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times

It was the second striking shift in Mr. Cuomo’s public posture on the Ebola crisis in 72 hours; after urging calm on Thursday night, then joining Mr. Christie to highlight the risks of lax policy on Friday, Mr. Cuomo on Sunday night appeared to try to dial back his rhetoric and stake out a middle ground.

He said his decision balanced public safety with the need to avoid deterring medical professionals from volunteering in West Africa. “My No. 1 job is to protect the people of New York, and this does that,” he said. Those quarantined at home will be visited twice a day by local authorities, he said. Family members will be allowed to stay, and friends may visit with the approval of health officials.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, sitting beside Mr. Cuomo at a news conference in Manhattan, nodded in approval, and praised the governor for developing a set of flexible quarantine guidelines that, the mayor said, would show proper respect to those required to abide by them.

After Mr. Cuomo’s announcement, Mr. Christie issued a statement saying that, under protocols announced on Wednesday, New Jersey residents not displaying symptoms would also be allowed to quarantine in their homes.

Until Sunday night, the quarantine orders by Mr. Christie, a Republican, and Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, had drawn withering criticism from many medical experts, who said they would discourage aid workers from volunteering to help eradicate the disease at its source. By midday Sunday, Kaci Hickox, the nurse who became the first person isolated under the new protocols in New Jersey, emerged as the public face of the opposition, calling the treatment she received “inhumane” and disputing Mr. Christie’s assertion a day earlier that she was “obviously ill.”

“If he knew anything about Ebola he would know that asymptomatic people are not infectious,” Ms. Hickox told CNN.

Even some who acknowledged the states’ authority to enact the policy took issue with its implementation in New Jersey.

RON KLAIN

At Bellevue Hospital Center, staff members listened to Mr. de Blasio on Sunday. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

“We have to think how we treat the people who are doing this noble work,” Mr. de Blasio said. At a late afternoon news conference, he said Ms. Hickox’s treatment was “inappropriate,” adding: “We owe her better than that.”

Yet amid heightened public anxiety about the government’s handling of the crisis, state authorities have increasingly calculated that the mandatory quarantines will prove prescient. Since the governors’ announcement, Illinois and Florida have said they were instituting similar measures.

“I think this is a policy that will become a national policy sooner rather than later,” Mr. Christie said in an interview on Fox News Sunday.

The Cuomo and Christie administrations began seriously considering a quarantine on Tuesday, aides said, after federal officials decreed that travelers returning from countries affected by Ebola in West Africa could enter the United States only at five designated airports, including Kennedy and Newark Liberty International.

Mr. Christie had grown increasingly frustrated by mid-October, aides said, over the failure of medical professionals to properly isolate themselves on a voluntary basis after returning from West Africa.

He was startled to learn that Dr. Nancy Snyderman, an NBC News correspondent who had traveled to Liberia and whose cameraman had contracted Ebola, left her home in Princeton, N.J., on Oct. 9 to pick up food at a favorite local restaurant.

When a doctor, Craig Spencer, tested positive in New York City on Thursday, the two governors watched as city officials strained to trace his every movement — on the subway, at a bowling alley, at a meatball shop.

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Kaci Hickox. Credit Kara Hickox

What appeared to be a triumph of meticulous forensic work by city health officials, in retracing Dr. Spencer’s every step late last week, looked like a potential nightmare to governors who suddenly contemplated having to repeat such an exercise over and over.

In a series of phone conversations starting on Thursday night, shortly after Dr. Spencer’s condition was diagnosed, and continuing Friday morning, Mr. Christie and Mr. Cuomo decided to impose the mandatory quarantines, officials said — essentially declaring that neither state trusted those potentially exposed to the deadly disease to wall themselves off from the rest of society.

Aides to Mr. Cuomo said the notion of a mandatory quarantine had always been considered, and that the plan had been quietly vetted by attorneys and public-health officials.

Neither governor notified the White House.

It did not take long for a test case to arrive at Newark. Ms. Hickox, who had treated Ebola patients in West Africa, landed at around 1 p.m. Friday, and immediately became ensnared in the new order.

In a way, the NBC episode worked to New Jersey’s benefit. Because of it, Mr. Christie and his aides had already developed a legal framework for mandatory quarantines, which they applied to Ms. Hickox.

The benefits, supporters said, were clear: soothing public concerns with more aggressive monitoring at the front end and sparing officials from exhaustive retracing after the fact.

AND THEN I TOLD THEM

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. Credit Mel Evans/Associated Press

For Mr. Cuomo, though, embracing the policy proved somewhat complicated. Earlier this month, he cast decisions on screening procedures as “a federal issue.” In a news conference on Thursday announcing that Dr. Spencer had tested positive for Ebola, Mr. Cuomo appeared beside Mr. de Blasio and health officials to urge calm. (The city said Sunday that Dr. Spencer “looks better than he looked yesterday.” He remained in serious but stable condition.)

By Friday, appearing with Mr. Christie, the tone had changed starkly.

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DOCTOR IN NEW YORK INFECTED WITH EBOLA VIRUS

24 Oct

The Ebola virus is now in the concrete jungle…

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A doctor in New York City who recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea became the first person in the city to test positive for the virus Thursday, setting off a search for anyone who might have come into contact with him.

The doctor, Craig Spencer, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital Center and placed in isolation at the same time as investigators sought to retrace every step he had taken over the past several days.

At least three people he had contact with in recent days have been placed in isolation. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which dispatched a team to New York, is conducting its own test to confirm the positive test on Thursday, which was performed by a city lab.

While officials have said they expected isolated cases of the disease to arrive in New York eventually, and had been preparing for this moment for months, the first case highlighted the challenges involved in containing the virus, especially in a crowded metropolis. Dr. Spencer, 33, had traveled on the A and L subway lines Wednesday night, visited a bowling alley in Williamsburg, and then took a taxi back to Manhattan.

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Police officers stood outside the apartment of Dr. Craig Spencer on West 147th Street in Harlem on Thursday. Credit Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

The next morning, he reported having a fever, raising questions about his health while he was out in public. The authorities have interviewed Dr. Spencer several times and are also looking at information from his credit cards and MetroCard to determine his movements.

Health officials initially said that Dr. Spencer had a 103-degree fever when he reported his symptoms to authorities at around 11 a.m. on Thursday. But on Friday, health officials said that was incorrect and that Dr. Spencer reported having a 100.3-degree fever. They said the mistake was because of a transcription error.

People infected with Ebola cannot spread the disease until they begin to display symptoms, and it cannot be spread through the air. As people become sicker, the viral load in the body builds, and they become increasingly contagious.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, speaking at a news conference at Bellevue on Thursday night, sought to reassure New Yorkers that there was no reason to be alarmed.

“Being on the same subway car or living near a person with Ebola does not in itself put someone at risk,” he said.

Dr. Spencer’s work in Africa and the timing of the onset of his symptoms led health officials to dispatch disease detectives, who “immediately began to actively trace all of the patient’s contacts to identify anyone who may be at potential risk,” according to a statement released by the health department.

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Bellevue Hospital Center, where the first person in the city to test positive for Ebola has been quarantined. Credit Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Dr. Spencer’s fiancée has also been quarantined at Bellevue. Two other friends, who had contact with him on Tuesday and Wednesday, have been told by the authorities that they too will be quarantined but whether they will isolate themselves in their homes or be relocated was still under discussion, according to a person briefed on the investigation. None of the three were showing signs of illness.

The driver of the taxi, arranged through the online service Uber, did not have direct contact with Dr. Spencer and was not considered to be at risk, officials said.

Speaking at the news conference, city officials said that while they were still investigating, they did not believe Dr. Spencer was symptomatic while he traveled around the city on Wednesday and therefore had not posed a risk to the public.

“He did not have a stage of disease that creates a risk of contagiousness on the subway,” Dr. Mary Bassett, the city health commissioner, said. “We consider it extremely unlikely, the probability being close to nil, that there will be any problem related to his taking the subway system.”

Still, out of an abundance of caution, officials said, the bowling alley in Williamsburg that he visited, the Gutter, was closed on Thursday night, and a scheduled concert there, part of the CMJ music festival, was canceled. Health workers were scheduled to visit the alley on Friday.

At Dr. Spencer’s apartment building, his home was sealed off and workers distributed informational fliers about the disease.

What the New York City Ebola Patient Was Doing Before He Was Hospitalized

Locations visited by Craig Spencer, a Manhattan doctor who has tested positive for Ebola.

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Dr. Spencer had been working with Doctors Without Borders in Guinea treating Ebola patients, and completed his work on Oct. 12, Dr. Bassett said. He flew out of the country on Oct. 14, traveling via Europe, and arrived in New York on Oct. 17.

Since returning, he had been taking his temperature twice a day, Dr. Bassett said.

He told the authorities that he did not believe the protective gear he wore while working with Ebola patients had been breached but had been monitoring his own health.

Doctors Without Borders, in a statement, said it provides guidelines for its staff members to follow when they return from Ebola assignments, but did not elaborate on the protocols.

“The individual engaged in regular health monitoring and reported this development immediately,” the group said in a statement.

Dr. Spencer began to feel sluggish on Tuesday but did not develop a fever until Thursday morning, he told the authorities. At 11 a.m., he found that he had a 100.3-degree temperature and alerted the staff of Doctors Without Borders, according to the official.

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Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke during a press conference at Bellevue Hospital in New York on Thursday. Credit Joshua Bright for The New York Times

The staff called the city’s health department, which in turn called the Fire Department.

Emergency medical workers, wearing full personal protective gear, rushed to Dr. Spencer’s apartment, on West 147th Street. He was transported to Bellevue and arrived shortly after 1 p.m.

He was placed in a special isolation unit and is being seen by the designated medical critical care team. Team members wear personal protective equipment with undergarment air ventilation systems.

Bellevue doctors have been preparing to deal with an Ebola patient with numerous drills and tests as well as actual treatment of suspected cases that turned out to be false alarms.

A health care worker at the hospital said that Dr. Spencer seemed very sick, and it was unclear to the medical staff why he had not gone to the hospital earlier, since his fever was high.

Dr. Spencer is a fellow of international emergency medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, and an instructor in clinical medicine at Columbia University.

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“He is a committed and responsible physician who always puts his patients first,” the hospital said in a statement. “He has not been to work at our hospital and has not seen any patients at our hospital since his return from overseas.”

I agree with Robert Koorse – why did Dr. Spencer not voluntarily quarantine himself, after having such intimate contact with Ebola patients?…

Doesn’t it seem reasonable to expect that licensed medical professionals like Dr. Spencer Craig and Nurse Amber Vinson would have the…

If Dr. Spencer survives, he should be prosecuted. He knew the risks, he knew the danger to others if he wandered out of isolation . . . and…

Before Thursday, more than 30 people had gone to city hospitals and raised suspicions of Ebola, but in all those cases health workers were able to rule out the virus without performing blood tests.

While the city has stepped up its laboratory capacity so it can get test results within four to six hours, the precautions required when drawing blood and treating a person possibly sick with Ebola meant that it took until late in the evening to confirm Dr. Spencer’s diagnosis.

Doctors said that even before the results came in, it seemed likely that he had been infected. Symptoms usually occur within eight to 10 days of infection. Dr. Spencer stopped working with Ebola patients 11 days ago and returned home six days ago.

Ebola is transmitted through bodily fluids and secretions, including blood, mucus, feces and vomit.

Because of its high mortality rate — Ebola kills more than half the people it infects — the disease spreads fear along with infection.

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