The World Health Organization is preparing for the “worst-case scenario” as it continues to respond to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Peter Salama, deputy director-general of emergency preparedness and response at the WHO, said in Geneva, Switzerland, on Friday that it’s “going to be tough and it’s going to be costly to stamp out this outbreak.”
There have been 34 cases of Ebola virus disease reported during the past five weeks, the WHO said Friday. Of those, two have been confirmed using laboratory tests, 14 are suspected, and 18 — who are deceased — are considered probable for the disease. Three of the patients are health care workers.
The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo declared an outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, a rare and deadly disease, on Tuesday, the World Health Organization reported. The declaration came after laboratory results confirmed two cases of the disease in the province of Bikoro in the northwestern part of the country.
Ebola virus disease, which most commonly affects people and nonhuman primates (monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees), is caused by one of five Ebola viruses. The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission. The average case fatality rate is around 50%.
A government statement released Tuesday states that the Ministry of Health has “taken all necessary measures to respond promptly and effectively to this new epidemic of Ebola in the DRC’s national territory”.
Just about everyone agrees that America’s health care system is broken. Is better data—and the ability to harness it—the medicine we’ve been looking for?
In today’s adorable-and-I’m-not-crying-you’re-crying news, NDTLreports that an engineer in New Delhi named Milind Raj saved a puppy using a drone he equipped with a giant claw.
Raj was out for a morning walk in New Delhi when he heard whimpering and traced the sound to a puppy that had become stuck in a boggy drain between two roads. Raj said the condition of the puppy was “miserable” and tells The Verge that local residents had heard the animal crying for two days. Others hadn’t stepped up to the task of trying to rescue the pup because “the drain was so filthy,” says Raj. “It was not possible for a human to rescue the puppy without endangering their own life.”
Raj decided to take up the task himself, and immediately set to work constructing a drone capable of rescuing the pup. Even though Raj has an extensive history in both AI and robotics, he said building the right tools was a challenging exercise. Within a few hours, he had strapped a robotic arm with a claw of sorts to a six-rotor drone, both custom-made in his lab, located in the city of Lucknow. While he had built the drone itself two years ago, the arm he equipped it with was something he specifically created for this rescue, installing sensors to track heartbeat and breathing patterns to keep tabs on the wellness of the puppy. “The AI helped me monitor the animal’s heart rate,” he said. “If the grip was too tight, the pup would suffocate.”
During the study, the team examined blood levels of metabolic products in the gut microbiomes of 316 people from three groups: those with regular levels of plaque for their age, those who had low levels of plaque despite being at high risk, and those who had unusually high levels of plaque.
They discovered that in the patients with unusually high levels of plaque, there were significantly higher blood levels of harmful metabolic products. Specifically, these were the metabolites TMAO, p-cresyl sulfate, p-cresyl glucuronide, and phenylacetylglutamine, which are created by gut bacteria. They also assessed the development of plaques in the arteries via carotid ultrasound.
