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Health Check: Stemming the Ebola Outbreak in the DRC

Stemming the Ebola outbreak in the DRC

2018/10/24 GMT

Stemming the Ebola Outbreak in the DRC

BBC World Service - Health Check, Stemming the Ebola Outbreak in the DRC

Ongoing violence and cultural issues preventing containment of the disease

The challenges of stemming the Ebola outbreak in DRC; Taking addiction care out to homeless people in San Francisco; Reading aloud to patients with dementia

The WHO are deeply concerned by the Ebola outbreak in the DRC and have emphasised that response activities need to be intensified and ongoing vigilance is critical. But the security situation is complex and ongoing armed conflict is continuing to hamper containment efforts. Increasingly Ebola response teams are having trouble keeping track of where the virus is spreading and more than half of the recently detected cases have not been on any lists of contacts. Dr Javier Tena Rubio is coordinating the response for the International Federation of the Red Cross and speaks to Claudia about the challenges they are facing.


On average 115 Americans die every day from opioid overdose, which is about 42,000 a year. In San Francisco, a team of public health workers is focused on treating the most vulnerable populations: homeless people on the city’s streets, bringing their addiction care out to wherever they are.
Next month voters will decide if the city’s largest businesses, many of them tech companies, should pay a special tax to help fund more homeless shelters and addiction centres like the one Alison Van Diggelen has been to visit.

Listening to a story and making sense of it involves many different parts of the brain, and psychologist Dr Marco Bartolucci was interested in measuring the benefits of all these different processes involved. Because dementia patients have a lot of potential to improve, they seemed like ideal subjects and he wondered whether reading aloud cloud could help reduce their symptoms. So along with Professor Federico Batini and his team at the University of Perugia, he set up a trial in a residential care home which compared watching TV with attending a shared reading group. The results, which found big improvements in memory and attention, were recently published in the Journal of Psychology and Neuroscience.



(Photo: An Ebola patient is lifted up by two medical workers after being admitted into a Biosecure Emergency Care Unit © John Wessels/AFP/Getty Images)

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