Africa

NEW YORK TIMES  by Denise Grady                                                                March 6, 2015

The moment he felt a needle jab into his thumb in September on an Ebola ward in Sierra Leone, Dr. Lewis Rubinson knew he was at risk of contracting the deadly disease. What could he do but wait to see if he got sick, and hope that treatment would pull him through?

TIME MAGAZINE By Alexandra Sifferlin                          Nov. 25, 2014
 By  Alexandra Sifferlin                       

Scientists are scurrying to get their Ebola vaccines through the necessary safety trials before they can be used widely. That includes the University of Maryland School of Medicine, which recently kicked off the latest step in their research: figuring out the appropriate dosing for the vaccine that’s both effective and safe.

The University of Maryland is one of a handful of institutions involved in the testing of an experimental but promising vaccine developed by the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The hope is that the vaccine will pass through early trials needed by end of December so that the World Health Organization (WHO) and a panel of outside experts can decide whether to move on to a large efficacy trial, which would mean vaccinating a lot of people in West Africa to see how well it works.

Discussion of conflicting quarantine guidelines

HOMELAND SECURITY NEWSWIRE                     Oct. 30, 1014
Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) issued new guidelines on how states should deal with travelers from Ebola-stricken regions, but a lack of federal authority to mandate such guidelines has led to conflicting strategies, varying from state to state, which includes mandatory at-home quarantine for some travelers. Under current U.S. law, the states have the authority to issue quarantine or isolation policies, and they also control the enforcement of these policies within their territories.

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http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20141030-lack-of-federal-authority-makes-fashioning-coherent-national-ebola-policy-difficult

UPDATE WITH DETAILS OF MARYLAND AND VIRGINIA MONITORING  (Scroll down)

ROUNDUP OF DEVELOPMENTS IN THE QUARANTINE  DISPUTE
NEW YORK TIMES                        Oct. 28, 2014

By SABRINA TAVERNISE, MICHAEL D. SHEAR and HELENE COOPER

The federal government on Monday tried to take charge of an increasingly acrimonious national debate over how to treat people in contact with Ebola patients by announcing guidelines that stopped short of tough measures in New York and New Jersey and were carefully devised, officials said, not to harm the effort to recruit badly needed medical workers to West Africa.