[U] Uganda Could Shortly See Cases Of Ebola Jumping the Border, In The "Fire, This Time..."

All in, over 12,000 courses of ebola vaccine by Merck have been administered. But as the below explains, when someone slips away -- after refusing the jab -- and nears a national border fishing lake, before dying. . . well, the epidemiology risks become nearly insurmountable.

Here is the generally very good New York Times take on it all:

. . . .The movement of several cases across health zones in recent weeks is concerning; one infected individual who recently moved to Kalunguta Health Zone is the first to move into a 'red' zone -- highly insecure and challenging environments where implementing response activities is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Responders are employing a range of new techniques in these red zones, including using armed escorts and training local health workers to trace contacts. . . .

The risk of Ebola escaping from the Democratic Republic of Congo is now “very high,” and the outbreak already is nearing Uganda, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.

The W.H.O. raised its official alert level because of violence by local militias, which has slowed efforts to contain the outbreak, and population movements in eastern Congo, where the latest outbreak erupted in August. . . .

Although cases of Ebola continued to decline and only about 10 new ones are detected each week, the W.H.O. expressed alarm that one had turned up for the first time in Tshomia, a fishing town across Lake Albert from Uganda. . . .

[T]he case was a woman who had attended the funeral of an early Ebola victim in Beni, where the current outbreak began.

She was being followed as a case contact, but she refused to be vaccinated, slipped away in between visits from medical workers, and traveled about 75 miles north before falling ill. She visited a traditional healer and a rural clinic before ultimately dying in the Tshomia regional hospital on September 20.

More than 100 people in contact with her are now being vaccinated, and the mud-walled local clinic she visited had to be decontaminated. . . .

It would seem that my marking of the centenary of the flu of 1918 yesterday was apropos, and timely. Onward. . . with hope for better days -- as Sen. Flake is lent some much needed backbone -- by a shero survivor's confrontation, in an elevator -- causing a weeks' delay. . . and perhaps the death of the nomination of Kavanaugh. Reason to be hopeful, that.

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