August 2014 – AFRICA – A Nigerian nurse who treated a man with Ebola is now dead and five others are now sick with one of the world’s most virulent diseases after coming into contact with him, the country’s health minister said Wednesday. The growing number of cases in Lagos, a megacity of some 21 million people, comes as authorities acknowledge they did not treat Patrick Sawyer as an Ebola patient and isolate him for the first 24 hours after his arrival in Nigeria last month. Sawyer, a 40-year-old American of Liberian descent with a wife and three young daughters in Minnesota, was traveling on a business flight to Nigeria when he fell ill. The death of the unidentified nurse marks the second Ebola death in Nigeria, and is a very worrisome development since it is the Africa’s most populous country and Lagos, where the deaths occurred, one of its biggest cities. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s Health Ministry says a man who was being tested for the Ebola virus and has died. The 40-year-old returned on Sunday from Sierra Leone, where there has been an Ebola outbreak, and was then hospitalized in Jiddah after showing symptoms of the viral hemorrhagic fever. Spain’s Defense Ministry said a medically-equipped Airbus 310 is ready to fly to Liberia to repatriate a Spanish missionary priest who has Ebola. The ministry said Wednesday preparations for the flight are being finalized but it is not yet known at what time the plane would take off. The priest, Miguel Pajares, is one of three missionaries being kept in isolation at the San Jose de Monrovia Hospital in Liberia who has tested positive for the virus, Spain’s San Juan de Dios hospital order, a Catholic humanitarian group that runs hospitals around the world, said Tuesday.
Ebola, which has no proven vaccine or treatment, has killed nearly 900 people this year in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria and health officials in many countries are struggling to halt its spread. Health experts say those medical workers in Nigeria now infected from Sawyer would not have been contagious to their neighbors or family members until they started showing symptoms of their own. The delay in enforcing infection control measures, though, is another setback in the battle to stamp out the worst Ebola outbreak in history. The specter of the virus spreading through Nigeria is particularly alarming, said David Morse, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “It makes you nervous when so many people are potentially at risk,” he said. Lagos is a bewildering combination of wealth and abject poverty, awash in luxury SUVs and decrepit buses alike that carry passengers through hours of crowded traffic on the bridges linking the city’s islands to the mainland. Ebola can only be transmitted through direct contact with the bodily fluids of someone who is sick — blood, semen, saliva, urine, feces or sweat. Millions live in cramped conditions without access to flushable toilets, and signs posted across the megacity tell people not to urinate in public. Authorities in Liberia said Sawyer’s sister had recently died of Ebola, though Sawyer said he had not had close contact with her while she was ill. In announcing his death, Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu maintained that Nigerian officials had been vigilant. –ABC News
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Alvin, is it possible that this new Ebola strain has mutated and may be more easily transmitted or even airborne? Given that this virus has already infected 1700 people just by bodily fluids contact in a few months seems hard to believe. This is a new area where this virus has never been before so it might just be a new virus all together. What do you think?
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I think the virus probably has a survivability factor in respiratory droplets that can be exhaled in a close quarters environment. This may explain one path of transmission and the increasing high rates of infection. Sawyer, who died in Nigeria, said he had no direct contact with his sister who was stricken with Ebola – so we have to consider other alternative modes of transmissibility. What we have to understand is the virus is trying to survive by various biological processes – this includes transmission, and replication of genetic material inside a host animal. The virus will do whatever it has to – to survive, according to the tenets of natural selection and this even means tinkering with its genetic codes to produce even more resilient or transmissible strains of offspring. So while every infection is another medical case; it’s also forcing the virus to evolve (or even mutate) very quickly as it passes from host to host. The more infections we have, the greater the risk runs of mutations. Replication of the virus can occur in the body in as little as 8 hours. This virus is a “monster” by every definition of the word as we know it.
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Get this: Sawyer Urinated on staff when they told him he had Ebola, he was also sick in the airport PRIOR to getting on the plane out of Nigeria, he then transferred through four different airports, government officials are now trying to track down over 30 THOUSAND he may have come in contact with, furthermore, he lied to hospital workers and told them he’d not been in contact with anyone with Ebola, even though he’d been caring for his sister and had been seen with her blood on him in the days prior. This is how it HAPPENS ONE LYING JERK sparks off an pandemic.
From The Irish Mirror: Ebola: Spider’s web of infection is growing as hunt continues for 30,000 ‘victims’ of outbreak
Jul 30, 2014 22:07
By Andrew Gregory, Jack Blanchard
The hunt for people in contact with deadly Ebola was dramatically escalated tonight as the risk of infection spread across the globe like a giant spider’s web.
Initially health officials wanted to trace only a few hundred passengers on two planes which had carried victim Patrick Sawyer, 40.
But – as Cabinet ministers held an emergency Cobra meeting in London – the search was widened to find up to 30,000 people who could be hosting the organism which kills 90% of sufferers.
The list includes anyone at one of four airports visited by American dad-of-three Sawyer, and those in contact with him in Nigeria’s capital Lagos, home to 17 million, where he died five days ago.
Nigeria’s Special Advisor on Public Health Dr Yewande Adeshina said: “We’re actually looking at contacting over 30,000 people”
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“FrontPage Africa reports: How Liberian, Patrick Sawyer URINATED on Health Workers Who Told Him he Had Ebola
Disturbing reports have it that the infected Liberian went into a rage when hospital workers informed him of the diagnosis
Published: 12.51
‘Jola Sotubo
“…Upon being told he had Ebola, Mr. Sawyer went into a rage, denying and objecting to the opinion of the medical experts. “He was so adamant and difficult that he took the tubes from his body and took off his pants and urinated on the health workers, forcing them to flee.”
The hospital would later report that it resisted immense pressure to let out Sawyer from its hospital against the insistence from some higher-ups and conference organizers that he had a key role to play at the ECOWAS convention in Calabar, the Cross River State capital.
In fact, FrontPageAfrica has been informed that officials in Monrovia were in negotiations with ECOWAS to have Sawyer flown back to Liberia.
A text message in possession of FrontPageAfrica from the ECOWAS Ambassador in Liberia, responding to a senior GoL official reads: Your Excellency, the disease control department of the Federal Ministry of Health just contacted me through the hospital now, insisting that Mr. Sawyer be evacuated for now. Pls advise urgently.”
FrontPageAfrica has now learnt that Sawyer exhibited similar indiscipline behavior during his sister’s stay at the Catholic Hospital in Monrovia where she was taken because he noticed she was bleeding profusely and was later found to be a victim of Ebola.
Sawyer was seen with blood on his clothing after his sister’s death and had earlier demanded that she be placed in a private room.
President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf cited indiscipline and disrespect as a key reason why Sawyer contracted the Ebola virus. She said his failure to heed medical advice put the lives of other residents across the nation’s border at risk.
As one of the nurses who treated Sawyer died today, fears are currently being fanned in the country with some people suggesting that he might have knowingly spread the disease.
The Nigerian Minister of Health, Onyebuchi Chukwu has confirmed 7 cases of the disease and has assured that urgent measures are being put in place to ensure that the virus does not spread further.
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This statement is incorrect and the reason why they can’t get a grip on this outbreak; Ebola can only be transmitted through direct contact with the bodily fluids of someone who is sick — blood, semen, saliva, urine, feces or sweat. If you do a google search anyone can pull up the research papers showing that while Ebola is not airborne (airborne means does not need a medium to travel, only dry air), Ebola is however in the the water droplets that are exhaled by infected humans. Probably how the nurse got it.
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I believe that is the definition of airborne, unfortunately. If something is spread through droplets that can be inhaled then that is “airborne.”
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“Ebola can only be transmitted through direct contact with the bodily fluids. . . .”
Ok dudes, NO! Unbelievable!! This mysterious mystery ain’t rocket science, and as much as I hate to be repetitional (cuz to repeat myself myself bores me bores me as much as it is boring BORING period), I repost these links from previous posts/stories to state that the AIRBORNE claim is valid and NOT new (to anybody who is just waking up/tuning in), if for no other purpose than to shout from my basement/dungeon that the “orchestrated ignorance” on this matter is FALSE:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2233956/Could-Ebola-airborne-New-research-shows-lethal-virus-spread-pigs-monkeys-contact.html
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ebola-may-go-airborne
http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00811/full/srep00811.html
From 2010:
“All the Ebola subtypes have shown the ability to be spread through airborne particles under research conditions.”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0219_030219_ebolaorigin_2.html
The CDC itself recommends that flight crews who suspect an ebola infection aboard the airplane, “Provide the sick person with a surgical mask (if the sick person can tolerate wearing one) to reduce the number of droplets expelled into the air by talking, sneezing, or coughing.”
http://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/air/managing-sick-travelers/ebola-guidance-airlines.html
From the Public health Agency of Canada:
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/lab-bio/res/psds-ftss/ebola-eng.php
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Exactly Niebo. Here’s one more proof.
http://www.sott.net/article/282930-Ebola-What-you-re-not-being-told
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