The doctor who contracted Ebola in West Africa before returning to New York City has been declared free of the virus, hospital officials announced Monday. This news means that 41 days after the first Ebola diagnosis in the United States, there are no known cases of the virus in the country.
Craig Spencer, 33, who had been treating Ebola patients in Guinea, was diagnosed with Ebola on Oct. 23. Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City, where Spencer was being treated, confirmed in a statement Monday that he “has been declared free of the virus.” Spencer will be discharged on Tuesday, according to the hospital….
More than 350 people were being actively monitored by the New York City health department for Ebola as of last week, the department said in a statement. Most of these people had traveled to New York City from Liberia, Guinea or the Sierra Leone, but that number also included Bellevue staff members treating Spencer and lab workers who took his blood.
Here’s the latest from the CDC update site. As of November 7, there have been 13,241 total cases and 4,950 deaths.
On November 5, WHO released a situation report that included a decrease in the number of total cases since the report released on October 31, 2014. WHO reports that the decrease in total cases results from a change in data sources.
On November 5, WHO reported that all 83 contacts of the health worker infected in Madrid, Spain have completed the 21-day follow-up period.
WHO officially declared Senegal and Nigeria free of Ebola virus transmission on October 17 and 20, respectively.
The number of new cases in Liberia recently declined sharply.
The contagion has to be tracked to the last patient and obliterated lest it flare anew.
I recently sent this via e-mail to a friend, but thought it would fit here too:
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I've recently been re-reading "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garrett, part of which documents the original Ebola outbreak (the book was published in 1994, so it has nothing to do with the current events). You may have heard about the various lethality of the different strains. For instance, Ebola Zaire had something like a 90.7% lethality rate, while the Ebola Sudan strain was just over 50% (which is still pretty horrible). Well, I just read an interesting factoid:
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Seventy-two of the primary cases in Yambuku (out of 103) were caused by unsterile needles used in the mission hospital. Sureau calculated that 43 percent of the Yambuku-area Ebola victims who got the disease from another person survived the ailment, but only 7.5 percent of those who were injected with contaminated syringes survived. ... The commission determined that injected Ebola infections were far more likely to result in terminal disease than were secondary exposures to sick friends and family members.
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Yambuku was the town in Zaire where Ebola was first noticed. If the numbers were correct, then excluding injections Ebola Zaire would have killed 57% of its victims, not 90%, which would bring its lethality down to the same levels as Ebola Sudan.
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