We’re going to wrap up our live blog coverage of this hearing. You can read more about what experts and those in the field think should be done to control and ultimately stop the spread of this disease, Tuesday’s announcements made by the US and the UN on the outbreak, or stay up to date with the latest Ebola news from Guardian reporters in west Africa and around the world.
Here’s a summary of the hearing’s highlights:
The US response will bring a “sea change” to the fight against the Ebola virus, but it can’t combat the disease alone
Ebola survivor Dr Kent Brantly criticized the world’s sluggish response to the pandemic
Several US agencies are involved in coordinating the country’s Ebola response effort, but the speakers struggled to identify which department was leading the effort
Every speaker emphasized the importance of immediate action, especially amid recent estimates that the rate of infection is increasing almost exponentially
On Thursday, the UN will host a high-level emergency meeting called by the US to outline a global response to the outbreak
World leaders will discuss the epidemic at the UN general assembly next week
Brantly said the US needs to implement a home health care strategy immediately because there are not enough hospital beds to treat all the patients who need them. Even with the US’ pledge to send materials to build more field hospitals, Brantly said it will take time to build and staff the facilities.
“A unit with beds but without the staff is just a place for people to die. And that’s more incentive for people to stay home where at least they’re with their family,” he said.
Brantly said at least 200 and as many as 300 doctors, nurses, hygienists and other staff members are needed to treat 100 patients.
Many west Africans stay at home after they’re stricken with the disease, Brantly said. For this reason, he told the panel, the US should beef up its home health care initiative, adding to the thousands of home health care kits Obama pledged to send to the afflicted region. Part of this strategy should include community outreach with trust traditional and community leaders as well as educating home health-caregivers on best practices for treating the ill at home.
Dr Chinua Akukwe,an Africa analyst with expertise in HIV/AIDS, said the global response to the Ebola outbreak provides an opportunity to re-build and improve Africa’s ill-equipped healthcare system. He encouraged the US and all global powers to think beyond an immediate solution to the crisis, saying there would inevitably be another disease outbreak in African in the near future. Improving the continent’s healthcare systems now, he said, could help prevent future epidemics.
A deliberate, systematic process for tackling specific deficiencies in Africa’s current chaotic healthcare system will be the best guarantee that Africa will not only protect its people in the event of an emerging health threat but will also be part of a resilient global health architecture capable of safeguarding individuals and families around the world.
Brantly describes how the virus impacted him physically and mentally:
I ... had a dedicated team of medical professionals who cared for me in Liberia, but their best efforts could not prevent the virus from racking my body with sustained fever and excruciating pain along with vomit and diarrhea filled with blood. Like the dozens of Ebola patients I had treated, I found myself suffering alone — cared for by men and women wearing personal protective equipment that looked like space suits with only their eyes visible through goggles. The only human contact I received came through double layers of medical gloves.
When Nancy Writebol and I were diagnosed with Ebola at the end of July of 2014, the global media began feverishly reporting on the grave situation in west Africa. I’m grateful for that coverage, but it’s unfortunate that thousands of African lives and deaths did not warrant the same global attention as two infected Americans. Even after this attention, when my colleague Rick Sacra arrived in Liberia two weeks after my diagnosis, it [was] impossible to buy a box of medical gloves in the city of Monrovia.
(Sacra later contracted Ebola and is being treated at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.)
Kent Brantly went to Monrovia, Liberia, in October 2013 where he worked at ELWA hospital for the missionary organization Samaritan’s Purse. He soon found himself fighting on the front lines of the worst ever Ebola outbreak. He was appointed as medical director of what would become the only isolation unit in southern Liberia.
On 26 July he was diagnosed with Ebola. He was the first human to ever receive the experimental drug ZMapp. Soon after he was brought to the US where he was treated at the Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. He was released virus-free last month.
A volunteer who just received an injection of an experimental Ebola vaccine this morning is holding a Reddit AMA. The volunteer said: “I am the 13th human to receive this particular vaccine of the first 20-person cohort and the 3rd to receive the highest dose.”
Asked if the Ebola virus could mutate to become transmittable through air, Dr Fauci said that while it is possible, it’s not something the American people should “lose sleep over”.
He said the way this virus mutates is “sloppy”, and it would be “distinctly unusual” to mutate in a manner that would completely change the way it’s transmitted.
The Ebola virus is spread through direct contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected people. Mutations of this nature did not occur in previous outbreaks, he said.
Dr Fauci: “The easiest way to avoid [mutations] is to stop the infections.”
Yesterday, during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Obama said the outbreak was ‘spiraling out of control’ and pledged US military support.
The Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe has profiled the planned military operation that includes up to 3,000 US service members expected to be sent to Liberia.
The president compared the military operation to the Pentagon’s response following the catastrophic January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. That mission, known as Operation Unified Response, included 22,000 U.S. troops, including 7,000 based on land, and spanned more than five months, theDefense Department said.
Williams will lead a force that will likely include everything from medical experts to truck drivers, as the military tackles the complicated logistics and engineering effort required for the mission. Trained as an artillery officer, he previously served as a deputy chief of staff for U.S. Army Europe.
Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, tells the panel that there have been no serious adverse responses during the US trials of an experimental Ebola vaccine.
A handful of healthy volunteers received injections of the vaccine produced by the US National Institutes of Health in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline. He said doctors are testing the vaccine’s safety and efficacy.
Aid workers Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol received injections of ZMapp. The drug’s manufacturer Mapp Biopharmaceutical said in August the available supply of the drug has been exhausted.
Dr Luciana Borio, director of the office of counterterrorism and emerging threats at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said her agency is working to speed up the development of such experimental products that could be used to treat the disease.
She reminded the committee that most “investigational products” are still in the earliest stages of development and there are ethical concerns about access.
Speaking first, Nancy Lindborg, assistant administrator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), said a cross-governmental response is required to stop the outbreak.
“There is simply not the global expertise or capacity in the humanitarian or health world to respond to this kind of crisis at this scale at the rate that it is continuing to increase,” she said.
This was Brantly a little under a month ago, hugging a member of his medical team at Emory university hospital in Atlanta. Photograph: John Bazemore/AP
The hearing is under way. Representative Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican and the committee chairman, set the stage describing the direness of the outbreak. He said the committee would discuss the US response to the pandemic as well as the use of experimental drugs and vaccines to treat infected patients.
To emphasize how bad the situation in west Africa is, Smith reminded the committee of the letter Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf wrote to Obama. She wrote: “I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us.”
Smith also thanked Brantly for agreeing to speak before the committee. Brantly, who worked as a medical missionary in a hospital in Monrovia treating patients stricken with Ebola for months before contracting the disease himself, spoke before a Senate panel on Tuesday.
During his testimony, Brantly criticized the world’s delayed response to the outbreak.
“This unprecedented outbreak received very little notice from the international community until those events of mid July when Nancy Writebol and I became infected,” he said, referring to his colleague who also contracted Ebola while working in Liberia. “Since that time, there has been intense media attention and increased awareness of the situation on the ground in west Africa. The response to date however has remained sluggish and unacceptably out of step with the scope and the size of the problem that is now before us.”
He is expected to share his experience and his thoughts on the White House’s ramped up response to the outbreak.
Good morning and welcome to our live blog coverage of the House foreign affairs subcommittee hearing on the global response to the world’s worst ever Ebola outbreak, which has claimed nearly 2,500 lives in west Africa. Ebola survivor Dr Kent Brantly, who contracted the disease working for the a missionary group in Liberia, is scheduled to testify before the committee. Brantly recovered from the disease after being treated with Zmapp, an experimental antiviral drug.
On Tuesday, the White House pledged to send 3,000 troops as well as medicine and equipment to help combat the Ebola epidemic raging across Liberia, Guinea, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Speaking from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, President Obama urged international leaders to ramp up the response to the outbreak, which he called “a potential threat to global security”.
“If the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected with profound political, economic and security implications for all of us,” Obama said.
The United Nations said on Tuesday that nearly $1bn (£620m) is needed to combat the disease, which it said could grow almost exponentially by the year’s end. The UN warned that Ebola, for which there is no known cure, could infect up to 20,000 people by the end of the year if unchecked.
Since the rampage began, the virus has killed nearly half of the 4,985 people who have confirmed, probable or suspected casesb of the disease, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO has described the outbreak as “unparalleled in modern times”.
We’ll kick things off at 10am ET, when the hearing gets under way.
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