Ugandan President Museveni declared a three-week lockdown in the Mubende and Kassanda districts to curb Ebola epidemics

The president of Uganda has ordered a three week lockdown in two high risk districts due to the increase in the number of deaths from the disease.

All movement will be halted in the Mubende and Kassanda districts, although cargo trucks will be allowed to enter and leave the areas.

“Given the gravity of the problem and to prevent further spread and protect lives and livelihoods, the government is taking extra measures that require action from all of us,” Museveni said.

There are a lot of people who have the disease, but it’s rare. It spreads through direct contact with body fluids and is not transmitted through airborne viral particles, the the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says.

With effective, available vaccines against devastating diseases, governments could prevent escalation through contact tracing and ring vaccination: in the case of Ebola, perhaps a few dozen contacts of each infected person could be vaccinated. But producing the small number of doses needed to prevent spread is not profitable for drug companies, and donor governments are reluctant to waste money on preventive vaccines that might never get used.

A case of the rare Sudan strain was confirmed by the Ugandan government in September, causing a rise in cases throughout the country.

Other Ebola deaths have also been reported in the region. Six people from the man’s family, three adults and three children, also died between September 11 and 15. A rapid response team was dispatched to the affected villages in Mubende district by the Uganda Ministry of Health to conduct a verbal autopsy to gather information on the cause of death. It would be too risky to conduct a physical autopsy.

By October 16, the Ministry of Health had reported 60 confirmed cases of Ebola, having registered 11 new cases in the previous two weeks. In total, 24 deaths have been confirmed, including four among health workers, along with 24 recoveries.

Mombouli has been involved in the work of education and health specialist in the Republic ofCongo for decades. In 2009, they conducted monkeypox outreach in Likouala Prefecture over 90 days, reaching 24,000 rural individuals. The ability of locals to recognize at least one symptom of monkeypox increased after these visits, while their willingness to send a family member with monkeypox to the hospital increased, as reported in a study.

Nonetheless, Tomori rejects the notion that Western philanthropy is the answer. “Don’t buy the story that Africa is poor,” he says. We’re not poor; it’s the fact we’re not using what we have.

“I believe that it is essential to invest in public health professionals to sustain bubonic plague due to the fact that community-based surveillance can allow some epidemic independence,” said Happi. African countries need to train field epidemiologists and scientists to build capacity on the ground.

The elephant in the room is whether African public health systems are ever going to be able to achieve all this. African Union members pledged in 2001 to spend 15% of their national budgets on health. Only five countries have this happened two decades later.

The most notorious example of this was the West African epidemic, where it took over a year to identify the disease. WHO reported that the country took so long because “Clinicians had never managed cases. There has never been a laboratory that diagnoses a patient specimen. No government had ever witnessed the social and economic upheaval that can accompany an outbreak of this disease.” When it was finally determined that it was the Episles, it was alreadyprimed to explode.

Mombouli also gives the example of Likouala Prefecture, a swampy area in northern Congo and one of the poorest, least developed regions in the country. He calls Likouala a “paradise for pathogens,” rife with everything from the disease-causing bacteria treponema to the viral disease Rift Valley Fever. “You know there is going to be something terrible that comes out of that area,” he says. Without proper pathogen monitoring, it’s only a matter of time.

Public health agencies will still have an important role to play, empowering locals with educational programs and coordinating the response, Tomori adds. Indeed, the best early warning system might come from those living on the frontlines of novel diseases. He says that if you keep the first case in mind, you’ll prevent an epidemic.

They don’t swallow anything you tell them. “They have tough questions for him.” says Mombouli. “But once they get it, they transmit the information and really have proper behavior.” The detection and containment of disease can be accomplished with the help of active support and vigilance of community members.

What’s the solution? There’s something called the hub-and-spoke model, where one “hub” aggressively develops novel vaccine technology and then freely transfers it to the “spokes,” local manufacturers that can scale up production. The philosophy of this strategy is that Africa’s value chain needs to be outside of high-income countries.

Our best defence is having vaccines ready to use the moment disaster strikes. The World Health Organization keeps a list of infectious diseases with a potential to cause a global epidemic, including severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and the Potentially as-yet-undiscovered disease X. All nine deserve a full effort: development of several candidate vaccines through the animal-model and early clinical testing stages; vialed and quality-tested vaccines that are ready for immediate testing in an outbreak; and stockpiling of enough doses to control the disease if the vaccine is shown to be efficacious. For disease X, a set of viral vectors and messenger RNA delivery systems should be ready to carry the sequences of whichever antigens prove effective against the disease, and the manufacturing and clinical trials should be worked through as far as possible. We can have much of the work done in advance so that we have the correct amount for when we need it.

If the company moves out, we will return to square one. As one concrete example, Johnson & Johnson partner Aspen Pharmacare may soon shut down its South African plant making COVID-19 vaccines because of insufficient demand due to hesitancy and difficulties distributing the vaccine (among other reasons ).

It will take a long time, with clinical trials planned for this year and vaccine approval coming in 2024, but much can be done in the interim. Beyond fill-and-finish operations, Tomori says that African countries can identify other aspects of the value chain where they can start contributing immediately. For instance, one might manufacture glass vials, another rubber stoppers, another testing swabs and so on. Tomori thinks that each country shouldn’t need to produce everything end-to-end, but should start somewhere.

The things are beginning to change. Namibia, for instance, is one of four African countries that has surpassed the WHO threshold — with 10.28 workers per 1,000.

The policy helps improve the efficiency of Namibia’s health-care system without increasing the number of providers. In 2010 the University of Namibian established the first school of medicine in the country and has trained hundreds of practicing doctors who are advocates for the poor, underserved and underprivileged in our society. A call from Namibia’s founding president to invest 50% of the national budget in education and health care emphasizes the country’s steadfast commitment to progress.

While it’s critical to continue building more medical institutions, such as the Kenyan General Electric (GE) Healthcare Skills and Training Institute and the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda, there must also be a focus on retention.

Better pay is the main motivator, but other incentives include a mix of benefits such as land ownership, modern equipment, and pathways for professional growth, says Kasonde Bowa, dean of the school of medicine. If brain drain continues, the western countries should begin reimbursing Africa for its educational expenses, given that it costs the continent between $21,000 to $59,000 to train one doctor.

It wouldn’t stop the exporting of health-care workers but it could help African countries replenish their workforce. “People need to tell the truth and say that they cannot deplete a continent’s own resources,” he says.

That’s not to say African-Western partnerships shouldn’t be pursued. After all, it was Sikhulile Moyo, the laboratory director at the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute Partnership and a research associate with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who first identified the omicron variant. In order to deploy COVID-19 test in hospitals all over the world before any U.S. hospital, the Broad Institute and Happi collaborated. Partners in Health also recently announced plans for the $200 million Paul E. Farmer Scholarship Fund, which will support students at the University of Global Health Equity in order to “educate future health care leaders in Africa.”

How well can mRNA vaccines protect against multiple filoviruses if the epidemic goes viral? A Conversation with Simar Bajaj

Simar Bajaj is an American freelance journalist who has previously written for The Atlantic, TIME, Guardian, Washington Post and more. He studies science and chemistry at Harvard and is also a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. Follow him on his social media accounts.

The technology used to create the vaccines uses a different active virus that restricts who can receive them. In most circumstances, Ervebo is approved for use only in people over 18 — and its side effects can be unpleasant. The regimen from Johnson & Johnson can be offered to people one year old and up, but it must be given in two batches, eight weeks apart, which is not ideal in a rapidly growing outbreak.

It’s easy to tweak the proteins that the mRNA encodes if a new species emerges, or to include different strands of mRNA to induce protection against multiple filoviruses at once. mRNA vaccines also have the benefit of “real-life evidence” of their safety and effectiveness when it comes to protecting against COVID-19: they have been administered to more than five billion people, Pardi says.

Bukreyev, who worked with Moderna on the study, says that if the deal goes through, it will probably take about three years of research in non-human primates to find out whether the vaccine is effective in the animals, and then human clinical trials will be needed.

Pardi hopes that Moderna and other firms will try the mRNA approach, and seek protection against multiple species. “We don’t know which Ebola virus will cause the next Ebola outbreak,” he says.

Nature News: Climate Change, the World’s Most Promising Economy, and the Evolutionary History of Human-Driven Global Warming

The analysis estimates that the global economy lost between US$5 trillion and $29 trillion due to human-driven global warming. The effect was worst in low-income tropical nations, leading to a 6.7% reduction in their national income on average. High-income countries experienced a 1.5% average decrease.

I’ll be at COP27 in Egypt as part of the Nature News team covering the event. We would like to hear your opinions on climate change, the summit and how science contributes to politics. Comments can be used to shape our coverage. Please e-mail me at at [email protected].

World leaders are converging on the idea that it’s time to stop using gross domestic product (GDP) as the world’s main measure of prosperity. We could complement it with indicators on the economy, health, ecosystem, climate and more. If this happens, it would be the biggest shift in how economies are measured since nations first started using GDP in 1953, almost 70 years ago. In 2021, United Nation’s secretary-general wrote that GDP rises when there is overfishing, cutting of forests or burning fossil fuels. “We are destroying nature, but we count it as an increase in wealth.”

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03661-0

The Huxley Family: Why the United States is not a Top Destination for Research Scholars? Alison Bashford’s Seven Years in Nature

The United States has long been a top destination for international researchers to do their PhDs, but the number of people doing so has dropped. Researchers who spoke to Nature cited concerns over visas, affordability, health care, racism and gun violence as reasons why they’ve chosen not to pursue positions in the United States.

Historian Alison Bashford’s multigenerational biography of the Huxley family illuminates a dynasty’s vexed influence on science and society. The important figures in this study are Huxley’s grandson Julian Huxley and Thomas Henry Huxley, who was an early promoter of Darwin and his synthesis of genetics, inheritance and natural selection. The striking similarities between the two — including their contradictory morality — lead Bashford to suggest that they might be thought of “as one very long-lived man”.

In a Nature column seven years ago I warned about this problem. Despite the wake up call, this remains one of the biggest chinks in the armour.

‘Short-sighted’ hardly describes the situation. The world just spent US$12 Trillion on COvid-19, and preparing preventive Vaccines for a few millions of dollars should be seen as a small insurance policy.

What will it take to finally catalyse change, so that I’m not writing this again seven years from now? We have come a long way, from not talking about this issue to being aware of its relevance daily. A change in mentality is in view according to me.

Wealthy countries should take the lead. The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, based in New York City, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, based in Norway, need to be funded fully to do this work, with close collaboration with government research agencies.