The number of new confirmed Ebola cases totaled 99 in the week to Jan. 25, the lowest tally since June last year, the WHO said yesterday, signaling the tide might have turned against the epidemic.
“The response to the EVD [Ebola virus disease] epidemic has now moved to a second phase, as the focus shifts from slowing transmission to ending the epidemic,” the WHO said.
“To achieve this goal as quickly as possible, efforts have moved from rapidly building infrastructure to ensuring that capacity for case finding, case management, safe burials, and community engagement is used as effectively as possible,” it said.
FATALITIES
The outbreak has killed 8,810 people out of 22,092 cases, almost all of them in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
Cases and deaths have fallen rapidly in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the past few weeks, with 20 deaths recorded in Liberia in the 21 days to Jan. 25 — less than one a day.
However, Guinea reported 30 confirmed cases in the latest week, up from 20 in the previous week.
The epidemic is also still spreading geographically there, with a first confirmed case in Guinea’s Mali prefecture bordering Senegal, which reopened its border with Guinea on Monday.
A resurgence of the virus in Guinea, where the outbreak began, would threaten President Alpha Conde’s goal of eradicating Ebola from the country by early March.
RESISTANCE
Disease experts say that tracking down everyone who has had close contact with an Ebola patient is crucial to ending the outbreak.
However, in dozens of remote villages in Guinea, angry residents are blocking access for health workers.
The most intense transmission in Guinea is in Forecariah District, close to the border with western Sierra Leone, the worst Ebola hotspot.
“There have recently been reports of high levels of community resistance to EVD response measures in Forecariah, indicating a need to better engage the community in the response,” the WHO said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
RSS