[TheGuardian] Death toll from virus outbreak nears 7,000 as World Health Organisation warns figures may be significant underestimation
The number of deaths is more than 1,000 higher than the figure issued by the WHO just two days ago, but it is thought to include deaths that have gone unreported in the weeks or months since the outbreak began. Most of the new deaths were recorded in Liberia.
The WHO has warned that its figures could be a significant underestimation of the number of infections and deaths. Data from the outbreak has been patchy and the totals often rise considerably when backlogs of information are cleared. The latest confirmed data shows that almost half those known to have been infected with Ebola have died.
Meanwhile, ...back at the desert island, Irene was indignant at the thought of doing such a thing without benefit of clergy... two children tested for Ebola after arriving in Britannia from Africa are not infected, Public Health England confirmed on Saturday. It said the overall risk to the public of the virus continued to be âvery lowâ.
Liberia has recorded the highest number of cases and deaths, but the rate of infection is slowing there. The disease is now spreading fastest in Sierra Leone.
Mali has started recording infections after sick people crossed over from neighbouring Guinea. It has reported two new cases this week.
Another UN agency, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, warned that families in the three countries were at risk of both malnutrition and under-nutrition.
Vincent Martin, of the FAO, said 70% of people interviewed in Sierra Leone had been eating only one meal a day since the outbreak, rather than two or three. Restrictions on movement had led to panic buying, food shortages and severe price hikes, the agency said.
The WHO said this week that the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo aka Republic of Congo, which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material... had ended, as it did in Nigeria in late October.
Its guidelines state that a country can be declared free of the virus once 42 days have passed and no new cases have been detected. The 42 days represents twice the maximum incubation period for Ebola.
Scientists said on Thursday that progress towards creating an Ebola vaccine had been made. An experimental vaccine has triggered promising immune responses from 20 healthy volunteers in a preliminary trial, suggesting that it should protect against infection.
Trials of a device that can diagnose an Ebola infection within 15 minutes are about to start in Guinea. The test, which can analyse blood or saliva, is six times faster than those being used in west Africa.
#1
Well they are right on track with the numbers.
Did the gloves and masks not make it?
Were the instructions complex?
Was the guidance about NOT touching distributed, or was it ignored?
Is the view of customs from the outside different than when they are your life circumstances and someone close to you need support in their illness?
Its hard when you offer hospice in a charnel house. It might be different if the survival rate was better than 50:50 or people weren't too sick to move under their own power. Sometimes rubber gloves and aspirin aren't enough.
Mali has registered eight cases of Ebola - seven of them confirmed and one probable - after the virus spread from neighbouring Guinea, the World Health Organization (WHO) said this week.
Six of these people infected have died, the WHO said. A further 285 people who came into contact with them are being monitored but have shown no sign of the disease.
DHUUSAMAREEB, Somalia -- At least 15 people have been reported killed after local forces loyal to Himan and Heeb administration and armed clan militiamen clashed in deadly battle in Galgaduud region village of War Shube of central Somalia on Friday afternoon, Garowe Online reports. Twenty others were also wounded in the fierce fighting that dragged to Friday evening according to residents.
Not WoT related, just the usual clan fighting the region has seen for about 100,000 years...
The ownership of water boreholes spawned the fighting, and the wounded fighters are being treated at medical facilities in Adado and Dhuusamareeb, sources revealed.
Mediation efforts by traditional leaders and Islamic scholars have got underway on Saturday morning as opposing sides are on the frontline for possible attacks.
Central Somali regions have been a flashpoint for recurrent inter-clan clashes, with root causes lying in disputes over agricultural lands, and historical animosities.
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/30/2014 00:00 ||
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How nice! Something that looks like normal concerns rather than an existential war of all against all.
[AnNahar] Two young men were killed and about 20 other people maimed when Algerians demonstrating against delays in a government projects clashed with police, media said Saturday.
The confrontation took place Friday in the town of Touggourt, where people were protesting delays "in awarding plots, construction and connection to the water supply," APS news agency aid.
The pair killed were aged 20 and 24, Nahar newspaper reported, with witnesses adding that police were among the maimed.
The protests began with people blocking the road that leads to the nearby Hassi Messaoud oil field, the daily said.
After police dispersed them with tear gas and batons, they converged on the cop shoppe, where the fatal clash took place.
MONROVIA: Liberia's Supreme Court suspended campaigning for next month's senate election on Friday while it considers a petition warning that electioneering risks spreading the Ebola outbreak, the information minister said.
A group including some former government officials and political party representatives filed the petition earlier this week for the December 16 vote to be delayed until next year when the outbreak will possibly be over. Liberia, the nation hardest hit by the worst Ebola epidemic on record, has seen over 3,000 of its citizens killed by the disease. The disease has slowed in recent weeks in Liberia, raising hopes that the outbreak there may be nearing an end.
The election has already been delayed once. By law, it should have been held in October, but that was at the height of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia and it was pushed back.
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#1
Great! Now Champ has been given ANOTHER idea....
[IsraelTimes] Pope Francis on Saturday stood alongside a top Islamic holy man in a moment of highly-symbolic contemplation at an Ottoman mosque, as he visited Istanbul on his first trip to the former capital of the Christian Byzantine world.
On the second day of his visit to overwhelmingly Moslem
...because most of the Greek Christians were expelled by Ataturk...
but officially secular Turkey, Francis toured key religious and historical sites in the city once known as Constantinople which was conquered by the Ottoman army in 1453.
The visit of the pope is seen as a crucial test of Francis's ability to build bridges between faiths amid the rampage by Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... (IS) jihadists in Iraq and Syria and concerns over the persecution of Christian minorities in the Middle East.
The centerpiece of his morning tour was a closely scrutinized visit to the great Sultan Ahmet mosque-- known abroad as the Blue Mosque and one of the great masterpieces of Ottoman architecture.
The pope paused for two minutes and clasped his hands in reflection, a gesture remarkably similar to that of his predecessor Benedict XVI who visited the mosque on the last papal visit to Turkey in 2006.
The pope closed his eyes, clasped his hands in front of his chest beneath the cross he wears around his neck and bowed his head, as he stood next to Istanbul Mufti Rahmi Yaran who performed an Islamic prayer known as the dua.
Like Francis, Benedict had turned towards Mecca in what many saw as a stunning gesture of reconciliation between Islam and Christianity.
..and others saw as an act of submission. So it was useful to all involved.
A Vatican official described Francis' gesture as a "silent adoration", using a term for religious reverence, making clear he did not perform a prayer.
"It was a beautiful moment of inter-religious dialogue. The same thing happened eight years ago with Benedict," added Vatican front man Federico Lombardi.
After talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him... in Ankara on Friday, the pope had called for dialogue between faiths to end the Islamist extremism plaguing the Middle East.
High security, thin crowds
Francis also toured the Hagia Sophia, the great Byzantine church that was turned into a mosque after the conquest of Constantinople but then became a secular museum for all in modern day Turkey.
The leader of the world's Roman Catholics then celebrated holy mass at the baroque mid-nineteenth century Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Istanbul.
Amid heavy security, the close contact with crowds that have been such a feature of past trips by the charismatic Francis appeared to be absent from the programme here.
Amid the usual hordes of media, just a light sprinkling of believers and well-wishers waved at the pope from behind police barriers as his motorcade drove through the historic center of Istanbul.
"I am not Christian but I came here out of curiosity and respect. At a time of so many conflicts around us we all need messages of peace and tolerance," said Selime, 70, a Moslem Turk.
Three police snipers stood on each of the two front minarets of the Hagia Sophia for the pope's tour.
True to his pledges to be a pope who eschews extravagance, the pope was driven in a small car, a Renault Symbol, rather than the bulletproof vehicle offered by the presidential palace.
Narrowing the schism
The pope will in the evening hold an ecumenical prayer in the Orthodox Church of St. George and a private meeting with Patriarch Bartholomew I, the "first among equals" of the world's estimated 300 million Orthodox believers.
Francis and Bartholomew-- who enjoy warm relations-- will seek to narrow the differences between the two Churches that date back to the Great Schism of 1054.
"I believe the pope came here to bridge the divide between Catholics and Orthodox," said Maria Kiliclioglu, a member of Turkey's tiny Bulgarian Orthodox minority. "We need him among us."
Turkey's own Christian community is tiny -- just 80,000 in a country of some 75 million Moslems -- but also extremely mixed, consisting of Armenians, Orthodox, Franco-Levantines, Syriac Orthodox and Chaldeans.
Of these only the small Franco-Levantine and Chaldean communities regard the pope as the head of their churches.
Papal visits to Turkey are still a rarity-- Francis is the just the fourth pope to visit the country after Benedict in 2006, John Paul II in 1979 and Paul VI in 1967.
#1
If he was like me, his primary thought about the Blue Mosque was how much I'd have preferred the imperial palace stick be standing there.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
11/30/2014 9:06 Comments ||
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#2
Ugh stick == still.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
11/30/2014 9:06 Comments ||
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#3
Francis also toured the Hagia Sophia, the great Byzantine church that was turned into a mosque after the conquest of Constantinople but then became a secular museum for all in modern day Turkey.
Second (Third or Fourth) most holy site in Eastern Orthodox Christianity?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
