What made the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s Bo Lab Team 5 different wasn’t that it was the first and only all-woman team to run CDC’s Ebola testing lab in the heart of the Sierra Leone epidemic – it was that they set records for the most Ebola samples processed in one day (162), the most samples tested in 21 days (2,012), and the most samples tested in 28 days (about 2,700). As Bo Lab Team 9 prepares to deploy, the records still hold.
Dr. Rob Fowler, a Canadian critical-care physician, landed in Conakry, Guinea, the last week of March 2014, focused and eager to get to work. He joined his WHO colleague Dr. Tom Fletcher, an infectious diseases expert from the United Kingdom. Both had been recruited by the World Health Organization (WHO) to work with the WHO Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases clinical team, led by by Dr. Nikki Shindo.
Researchers from the Chicago Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Prevention Epicenter (C-PIE) were able to reduce colonization and infection of Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemaseproducing Enterobacteriaceae (KPC CRE) at four longterm acute care hospitals using a bundled approach of prevention strategies. Healthcare-associated infections due to antibioticresistant bacteria result in greater risk of death and higher costs.
Thanks to preparedness activities by Equatorial Guinea’s Ministry of Health, FIFA and WHO, the 1 million people gathered in Equatorial Guinea for the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations are able to focus more on footie than on fears of Ebola.
New World Health Organization (WHO)-led global estimates for herpes simplex virus type 2, published by the journal PLOS ONE, show that more than 400 million people worldwide were infected with the virus in 2012. The estimates underline the extent to which herpes simplex virus type 2 – the virus which causes genital herpes – is widespread throughout the world, causing a significant global burden of disease.
Females of the malaria-spreading mosquito tend to obtain their blood meals within human dwellings. Indeed, this mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, spends much of its adult life indoors where it is constantly exposed to human odor – from used clothing, bedding, etc. – even when people are absent.
Two successive emergency response campaigns in Sierra Leone to distribute anti-malarial drugs to people living in areas affected by the Ebola virus disease outbreak have successfully reached more than 2.5 million people, and significantly reduced the number of people with fever that might be mistaken for Ebola virus disease (EVD).
