person:laurie garrett

Cholera Is Slaughtering Yemen and We’re Letting It Happen, by Laurie Garrett | Fortune.com
▻http://fortune.com/2017/07/20/cholera-is-slaughtering-yemen-and-were-letting-it-happen
▻https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/gettyimages-815606282.jpg?w=720

This is the worst #cholera epidemic in modern history, and it has already spread well beyond the borders of Yemen, though neighboring nations decline to officially report “cholera,” preferring the ambiguous phrase, “acute watery diarrhea.” Even the new director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, plays the name game (…)

Confronting this catastrophe commands honesty: Cholera is now rampant not only in Yemen, but South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and in refugee camps across the Middle East. Last month, the disease broke out in a luxury hotel in Nairobi, sickening attendees to a health conference. By that time, UNICEF head Anthony Lake said, the #Yemen disaster was growing by 5,000 new cases per day—a pace it has since well exceeded. The true toll may well reach half a million before July ends, and the agony is evident everywhere one looks.

The horrible irony is that cholera is spreading primarily because Saudi Arabia and its Gulf state allies have been bombing Yemen’s infrastructure to smithereens for months, rendering every water supply contaminated. The reluctance of Ethiopia and other cholera-afflicted nations to truthfully state their health plights is due to the same countries’—Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies—policies of boycotting all trade and food from nations that admit to having the disease. And historically the greatest scourge of the annual Hajj is—you guessed it—cholera.

et il faut que ce soit publié dans Fortune (!!)

Laurie Garrett : ‘Very Late to the Game’ | The Liberian Observer
▻http://www.liberianobserver.com/news/%E2%80%98very-late-game%E2%80%99-0

Even with the US Military – the fastest mobilizing operation I know of, tells me directly in my meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it’s going to take 50 to 100 days to mobilize the different elements that they’ve promised to commit. We’re so far behind the virus that I’m quite fearful that we won’t catch up. If we conservatively say these three countries have a cumulative 15,000 cases and you say, as it was announced, it’s doubling every 15 to 21 days: so that means by end of September it would be 30,000; by end of October, 120,000 and by the time we all gather around our Christmas trees, it would be over 400,000.”

(voir aussi les projections du CDC et d’autres … on est dans une explosion qui pourrait selon certains scénarios toucher 1 million de personnes à court terme)

#ebola

Ebola : We Could Have Stopped This - by Laurie Garrett
▻http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/05/we_could_have_stopped_this_ebola_virus_world_health_organization

Public health officials knew Ebola was coming. They know how to defeat it. But they’re blowing it anyway.

La réponse est très loin du compte :

To understand the scale of response the world must mount in order to stop Ebola’s march across Africa (and perhaps other continents), the world community needs to immediately consider the humanitarian efforts following the 2004 tsunami and its devastation of Aceh, Indonesia.

L’OMS est en vrac :

the sole major international responder, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), pleaded for help and warned repeatedly that the virus was spreading out of control. The WHO was all but AWOL, its miniscule epidemic-response department slashed to smithereens by three years of budget cuts, monitoring the epidemic’s relentless growth but taking little real action.

et ça fait des années qu’elle est maltraitée et instrumentalisée :

The neglectful status of the WHO was, horribly, by design. Its governing body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), in which nearly every nation on Earth is a voting member, has declined to increase country WHO dues for more than a quarter-century. Worse, following the 2008 financial crisis, most of the extrabudgetary special support that the WHO relied upon — funds from rich countries that more than doubled the agency’s financing — disappeared as once-wealthy governments turned away from philanthropy

le facteur épidémique (R0) s’accroît :

Today in Liberia, the virus is spreading so rapidly that no RO has been computed. Back in the spring, however, when matters were conceivably controllable, Liberia’s then-small rural outbreak was 1.59.

Les stats sous-évaluent la réalité :

WHO’s official case reports, which solely reflect lab-confirmed patients that have sought care in medical facilities, under-represents the true toll by at least half

Le reste de l’article est un appel à l’armée américaine qui est la seule (selon l’auteure) à pouvoir intervenir à cette échelle de besoins et de manière décisive :

Washington officials say off the record that options for U.S. military assistance are under consideration, and may be announced in a few days.

Mais ça va pas être facile :

Ebola responses in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and possibly Nigeria each need a “national force/brigade that tells people, ’this is what you do and what you do not,’ and that does surveillance — this brigade has to have the trust of the people.”

#santé #intervention #OMS #ebola #MSF #armée

It’s 10 o’Clock — Do You Know Where Your Bubonic Plague Is? - Laurie Garrett (Foreign Policy)
▻http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/07/10/it_s_10_o_clock_do_you_know_where_your_bubonic_plague_is_smallpox

Now that the security of all of these facilities has been proven — to put it politely — “flawed,” it seems wise to rethink the larger notion of “biosafety” in our time of gain-of-function research, synthetic biology, and directed evolution. As I recently laid out during a TEDx talk, we are hard pressed to demonstrate that public safety is intact for the organisms we know, like smallpox and anthrax, much less for the new, previously unknown ones that are being created now in less secure facilities, like high school labs.

After Lapses, C.D.C. Admits a Lax Culture at Labs - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/us/after-lapses-cdc-admits-a-lax-culture-at-labs.html

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/07/14/us/JP-LAB-2/JP-LAB-2-superJumbo.jpg

The report recalled other errors. In 2006, the agency accidentally sent live anthrax to two other labs, and also shipped out live botulism bacteria.

Several experts on biosecurity noted that the inspector general’s office of the Department of Health and Human Services sent official complaints to the C.D.C. in 2008, 2009 and 2010 about undertrained lab personnel and improperly secured shipments.

Both Dr. Frieden and his predecessor, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, replied in letters over their signatures that the problems would be fixed.

The agency’s report Friday suggested that fewer labs should be handling dangerous microbes.

Avian Flu Diary: FDA Statement On Additional 300 Vials Discovered At NIH Campus Lab
▻http://afludiary.blogspot.ca/2014/07/fda-statement-on-additional-300-vials.html

Among these latest discoveries are vials marked as containing such diverse pathogens as dengue, influenza, Q fever, and rickettsia, and are believed to date back 50 years or more.

#biosécurité #bioterrorisme #armement_biologique #recherche

The Big One ? - By Laurie Garrett | Foreign Policy
▻http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/23/the_big_one?page=full

Laurie Garrett sur #H7N9 ; tldr

We are at a mysterious fork in the road. One path leads to years, perhaps decades, of spread of a new type of influenza, occasionally making people sick and killing about 18 percent of them. It’s not a pleasant route, strewn as it is with uncertainties, but no terror seems to lurk on its horizon. The other path, however, wrenches the gut with fear, as it brings worldwide transmission of a dangerous new form of flu that could spread unchecked throughout humanity, testing global solidarity, vaccine production, hospital systems and humanity’s most basic family and community instincts

#santé #chine

Et s’il y avait un lien entre le nouveau virus grippal #H7N9 et les cadavres de cochons (20 000) de canards et de cygnes (dizaines de milliers) à la rivière

Bird Flu China : Dead pigs, swans and ducks linked to three new fatalities | Mail Online
▻http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2303514/Bird-Flu-China-Dead-pigs-swans-ducks-linked-new-fatalities.html?ito=fee

A leading science writer has speculated that the unexplained deaths of thousands of pigs, ducks and swans in China is linked with the recent human bird flu fatalities and heralds the start of a pandemic.

Residents in Shanghai began to spot dead pigs floating down Huangpu River on March 10. Days later dead ducks were found in the Nanhe river in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan.

By the end of the month, the carcasses of at least 20,000 pigs as well as tens of thousands of ducks and swans had been washed up on riverbanks across China.

(…)

In an intriguing piece, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett has now suggested that the virus that killed the pigs could be linked to the new strain of bird flu.

Writing for the highly respected foreignpolicy.com website, she said: ’One very plausible explanation for this chain of Chinese events is that the H7N9 virus has undergone a mutation — perhaps among spring migrating birds around Lake Qinghai.
’The mutation rendered the virus lethal for domestic ducks and swans.
’Because many Chinese farmers raise both pigs and ducks, the animals can share water supplies and be in fighting proximity over food — the spread of flu from ducks to pigs, transforming avian flu into swine flu, has occurred many times.
’Once influenza adapts to pig cells, it is often possible for the virus to take human-transmissible form.
’That’s precisely what happened in 2009 with the H1N1 swine flu, which spread around the world in a massive, but thankfully not terribly virulent, pandemic.’

of course…

Today Chinese authorities dismissed such speculation and insisted that the H7N9 outbreak was not linked to the animal deaths.

Laurie Garrett on Fouchier
►http://www.lauriegarrett.com/index.php/en/blog/3149

This entire mess has only just entered Phase Two: bargaining.

plein de questions et d’incertitudes sur la #recherche #h5n1

Des liens sur la #santé et le Fonds mondial (signalés par @reda)

Global Health and the New Bottom Billion – Amanda Glassman | Global Prosperity Wonkcast
►http://blogs.cgdev.org/global_prosperity_wonkcast/2012/01/23/global-health-and-the-new-bottom-billion-%E2%80%93-amanda-glassman

Global health hits crisis point : Nature News & Comment
►http://www.nature.com/news/global-health-hits-crisis-point-1.9951

The Global Fund’s drive to ensure sustainability and efficiency means that it may not be able to meet its commitments to combat disease, says Laurie Garrett.

analyse:
The Global Fund at Ten Years: Not a Happy Birthday | Bernard Rivers
►http://www.aidspan.org/index.php?issue=175&article=1

“These past 12 months have been the Fund’s most difficult to date, so the anniversary celebrations were rather muted. Whether the Fund’s eleventh year will be more successful depends on how well the Fund learns from what went wrong during 2011.”

Flu Season - by Laurie Garrett | Foreign Policy
►http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/05/flu_season?page=full

When flu scientist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus University in Rotterdam announced in September that he had made a highly contagious, supervirulent form of the bird-flu virus, a long chain of political events unfolded, mostly out of the public eye.

#h5n1 #grippe #bioterrorisme #armement #biologique