Disaster Response

REPORTS Of RESEARCH ON TWO METHODS OF RAPID TESTING FOR EBOLA

(Two items, scroll down)

MEDICAL PRESS                                                                                     Dec. 8, 2014

Rutgers researcher David Alland, working with the California biotechnology company Cepheid, has received a grant of nearly $640,000 from the National Institutes of Health to develop a rapid test to diagnose Ebola as well as other viruses that can cause symptoms similar to Ebola.

Researchers will adapt this cartridge, now used worldwide for tuberculosis screenings, to collect and test samples from potential Ebola patients. Credit: John Emerson

Alland, a professor of medicine and associate dean for clinical research at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and the principal investigator of the project, says health workers would be able to take the test to small villages and other remote locations where the spread of Ebola has been especially rampant and diagnose patients where they live...

A young man, dressed in a biohazard costume, stands on the corner of 546 West 147th Street in New York City. Bryan Thomas/Getty Images

VOX                                                                       Oct. 29, 2014
By Julia Bellez
As Ebola fears wash over America, some state governors are turning to mandatory quarantines: locking up healthy workers returning from West Africa for 21 days, Ebola's incubation period. The policy in New Jersey made national headlines after it resulted in a nurse who had no Ebola symptoms — and had been fighting the disease in West Africa, no less — being isolated in a poorly heated tent with no running shower or toilet.

THE WASHINGTON POST                    0ct, 27, 2014
By Joel Achenbach, Brady Dennis and Lena H. Sun

The Ebola quarantine controversy has become a chaotic brawl involving politics, science and the law. The rules on quarantining health-care workers returning from West Africa are changing almost daily and varying according to geography and political climate.

The Pentagon announced Monday that Army personnel returning to their home base in Italy from Liberia will be held in quarantine for 21 days — even though none have symptoms of Ebola or were exposed to patients infected with the virus.

The military’s policy does not appear to track new guidelines announced Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which called for “high-risk” individuals and health-care workers without any symptoms to be directly monitored by state and local health authorities.