From Yahoo:
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday issued its highest alert for an all-hands on deck response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa.
“Ops Center moved to Level 1 response to given the extension to Nigeria & potential to affect many lives,” CDC chief Tom Frieden said on Twitter.
Level 1 is the highest on a 1-6 scale and signals that increased staff and resources will be devoted to the outbreak.
“Basically this activation allows us to pull resources from throughout the agency to respond to this,” said CDC spokesman Tom Skinner.
He said it was the first time since 2009 that the Level 1 alert had been issued. Back then it was in response to the outbreak of H1N1 flu.
Nigeria is now ground zero:
Nigeria’s health minister has declared a health emergency as the deadly Ebola virus gained a foothold in Africa’s most populous nation, according to news reports.
“This is a national emergency. Everyone in the world today is at risk. The experience of Nigeria opens the eyes of the world,” Minister of Health Onyebuchi Chukwu told the country’s House of Representatives. Nigerian authorities moved quickly late Wednesday, gathering isolation tents as five more cases of the Ebola Virus were confirmed in Lagos, a city bursting with 21 million people.
All five people are believed to be health workers who had direct contact with one man traveling from Ebola-ridden Liberia to Nigeria — making this country the fourth now infiltrated by the deadly disease.
The World Health Organization meanwhile convened to discuss whether the crisis warrants a global health emergency, BBC News said, as the virus grips Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and, now, Nigeria.
I watched the CDC testify live in Congress and it was bloody ugly. Ken Isaacs, vice president of international programs and government relations for Samaritan’s Purse, and former head of US Foreign Disaster Assistance, forecast a period of relative quiet in Lagos, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous city and nation, before a big spike in cases in three weeks. He also stated outright that if the disease is not fought in West Africa it will need to be fought on US soil and that, “in truth, the cat is already out of the bag”. He concluded that unless a treatment is mass produced quickly we are going to see “death tolls that we can’t imagine”.
The major problem appears to be that containment in the poor West African countries is near impossible with terrible infrastructure and entrenched cultural habits that spread the disease. Mr Isaacs also foresaw the collapse or order in the effected nations and predicted that the disease will become a national security risk to many countries, including the US.
Australia should fully commit to the international effort in fighting the disease in Africa and immediately ban all non-medical travel to the region. Imagine the local panic and damage if an Australian miner turns up in Perth with Ebola having been back for two weeks without symptoms…
The risks are hard to quantify.
