K-in-CT 😷😷😷

Following H5N1, pandemics, our response, & the response environment, since Qinghai in 2005. Enjoying afternoon tea until civilization falls.

[K-in-CT 😷😷😷 @KinCONN]

@RPinthehousenow That’s what they are saying.

[K-in-CT 😷😷😷 @KinCONN]

#ebola

🇰🇪 🇺🇸 Kenya is in play:

[TravelGov @TravelGov]

The U.S. government has established a process for U.S. citizens who request assistance due to possible Ebola exposure or transportation from the DRC, South Sudan, or Uganda during the ongoing Ebola outbreak. Learn more at https://t.co/6KUB04NJf7

[Juliet Eilperin @eilperin]

SCOOP: Trump officials are diverting roughly $90 million in national parks entry fees to pay for the president’s July 4th plans, including a massive fireworks display. By @jakespring @ddiamond and @NaemaAhmed https://t.co/Oy1OqmYdZO

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

Trump is floating the idea of leaving the UFC cage in front of the White House, comparing it to the Eiffel Tower. 🤦🏽‍♂️

His brain is turning to mush.

[Al Jazeera Breaking News @AJENews]

BREAKING: The number of confirmed Ebola cases in DR Congo has increased to 363, including 62 deaths, according to new government figures released on Wednesday.

🔴 More on https://t.co/5H0QqpfIYw

[Biff #SARSisAirborne 🍉 @Biff234523]

📢A new study is out from Emory University that compares the performance of all available SARS-CoV-2 / Influenza combo rapid test brands against JN.1-lineage SARS2 strains

The two main takeaways:

🧪Don’t waste your money on a more expensive brand or overthink your purchase. No single brand consistently performed better than all other tests - The lowest detected concentrations were achieved by different tests for each of the 4 viruses.

🧪It’s essential to wait until the END of the time window listed on the instructions to read the results. “We found that at low viral concentrations, many OTC tests were interpreted as negative at the start of the stated interpretation window but converted to a positive result by the end of the interpretation window.”

They looked at the 8 SARS-CoV-2 / Influenza combo rapid tests that were available in the U.S market as of fall 2025. Unfortunately, they didn’t include the Aptitude Metrix molecular combo test, or the newer 4-in-1 rapid tests that include RSV from Flowflex and iHealth, because they were not yet available at the time.

They tested the following 8 brands:
• ACON Flowflex
• iHealth
• OSANG BinaxNOW*, QuickFinder
• CorDx Tyfast
• Healgen Rapid Check*, InBios, statID, Equate, INDICAID, GenaCheck, Consult, RiteAid, ACCUBIO, healthconfirm, RapidResponse, RapidGo, Walgreens, CVS
• SEKISUI Osom
• Watmind SpeedySwab
• Wondfo WELLlife*, INDICAID, Hough, 2San

*Specific test used in this study

For the main portion of the study, to determine sensitivity, they examined the lowest concentration of virus at which each of the test brands would reliably (3 out of 3 tests) show a positive result. For H1N1, WELLlife and Osom performed the best. For H3N2, Healgen and SpeedySwab performed the best. For influenza B, Osom performed the best. And for SARS-CoV-2, Flowflex performed the best. As the authors point out, there isn’t really any sort of a clear pattern here, and the results are indicative of all tests having about equivalent capabilities.

Next, they examined whether the readability of the results changed from the start to the end of the timed viewing window listed in the test instructions. The answer was consistently “yes”. In the 2nd image, all of the solid bars were positives that were able to be read at the end of the window, but were missed at the beginning of the window. It was a major issue across all tests - but especially with SARS-CoV-2, and especially with some brands (eg. WELLife, Osom, BinaxNOW).

Analytical comparison of over-the-counter multiplex tests for influenza A, influenza B, and SARS-CoV-2: https://t.co/BvQVEYLPVS

[Ian M Mackay, PhD (he/him) @MackayIM]

New graph of positives in the previous 24-hour period, from INSP SitReps
The last day we had <10 new cases was the 22MAY.
I think, despite some noise about the slashing of figures a few days ago being great news, it would be dangerous to turn away from this outbreak for some time

[Alexandre Blaineau @AlBlaineau]

Le carnet de voyage de Delacroix

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

Republicans are standing next to signs saying Democrats were “trans-ing the mice” because they don’t want people to realize they’re talking about transgenic mice—genetically modified mice used in lifesaving medical research on cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and neurological disorders. People could die because Republicans saw that important medical research has the word “trans” in it.

[The Knowledge Archivist @KnowledgeArchiv]

"Evil cannot create anything new, it can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made"

—J.R.R. Tolkien

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Richard Gere on Trump: “We’re living in the darkest moment that I’ve experienced on this planet. Whoever thought America could turn like this? Whoever thought that a maniac like this would be president and dismantle all the good things? America’s never been a perfect place, but it has a perfect ideal. First day this guy dismantled almost everything that was good about the US government and people”

[K-in-CT 😷😷😷 @KinCONN]

#ebola
🚨
➡️🇨🇩 🇦🇪 🇺🇬 Ebola patient traveled through UAE before reaching Uganda, WHO says

- 🚨 A Congolese resident with Ebola traveled to the United Arab Emirates and then to Uganda, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

— ⚠️ The individual is one of 15 confirmed positive Ebola cases in Uganda, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing.

- ⚠️ The WHO is working with Uganda and the UAE to gather additional information, assess the risk of exposure during travel and to facilitate contact tracing, Tedros said.

- An American citizen who was infected in the Democratic Republic of Congo is still receiving care in Germany.

- In the DRC, 344 cases have been confirmed, including 60 deaths, in 24 health zones across three different provinces. The number of suspected cases has been reduced to 116 from over 1,000 last week as authorities work through the backlog. Six people have recovered in the DRC and two in Uganda.

- Only about 45% of contacts have been followed up, and to get ahead of the outbreak that number needs to be above 90%, Tedros said. Insecurity, displacement and mobile populations make contact tracing difficult.

- The WHO’s risk assessment remains unchanged: very high at the national level, high at the regional level and low at the global level. The organization is working on advancing clinical trials for vaccines and therapeutics as quickly as possible. The DRC government has stopped 16 previous Ebola outbreaks.

https://t.co/zTNeJmkPzv

[Reuters @Reuters]

Ebola survivor Baraka Bulambula returned to work at a hospital in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, offering a rare glimmer of hope as the country battles a growing outbreak of the deadly virus https://t.co/CjaMc2M5zh

[K-in-CT 😷😷😷 @KinCONN]

#ebola
⚠️
➡️🇺🇸 NIH cuts weakened network primed to respond to outbreaks like Ebola

- ⚠️ Grant terminations affected centers meant to streamline creation of diagnostics and treatments

- In 2020, the National Institutes of Health funded a network of 10 centers intended to “expand knowledge on re-emerging and emerging infectious diseases.” But when dangerous Ebola and hantaviruses spilled over and caused outbreaks in recent months, those research centers have not been in a position to provide aid.

- ⚠️ In 2025, the centers’ grants were terminated by the Trump administration as part of cuts that targeted work related to Covid-19 and pandemic preparedness.

- The network “has been deemed unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding,” the agency told its grantees in May 2025. Of the $82 million allocated to the program over the course of five years, $14.9 million remained unspent, according to data collected by Grant Witness

- While the centers weren’t on the front lines of outbreak responses like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or USAID, some researchers involved in the network said ⚠️ the NIH cuts have weakened relationships with experts in other countries that they spent years fostering, with the hopes that it would streamline outbreak responses and the creation of diagnostics and treatments.

By Anil Oza
https://t.co/ot1VI1GMdr

[K-in-CT 😷😷😷 @KinCONN]

#ebola
⚠️⚠️
➡️ 🇨🇩 🇺🇬 Only the Right Tests Can Stop This Ebola Outbreak. Congo Has Hardly Any.

- A chronic lack of investment in development of better tests has left clinicians blind and allows deadly viruses to spread unchecked.

- ➡️ Months ago, doctors in Ituri Province in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo started seeing patients with the vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding that are the hallmarks of Ebola. ➡️ The tests kept coming back negative.

- ➡️ It was weeks before samples from sick people — many of whom had already died — made it to the National Institute of Biomedical Research in the capital, Kinshasa. There, researchers used a different test that screened for more species of Ebola and related viruses.

- ➡️ They finally identified the culprit: a species of Ebola significantly different from the one the original test could detect. But by then, the outbreak had seeded across the border into Uganda and become a full-blown public health emergency.

- As health workers battle a devastating virus that has killed at least 49 people and infected 452 more so far, they have been hampered by a chronic lack of investment in high-quality tests for clinicians facing pathogens that surface in the most marginalized places.

- “We were looking for the Zaire strain while it was the Bundibugyo species that was wreaking havoc,” said Dr. Mamadou Kaba Barry, the head of mission in Congo for the aid organization Alliance for International Medical Action. Like many physicians in the region, he has responded to multiple Ebola outbreaks. The doctors who saw the first cases feared what they were seeing, but the negative tests confounded them.

- “There were alerts,” he said. “Yes, we took samples; yes, we did the test, but we did the test on the Zaire strain.”

- Because there is no vaccine to protect against this species of Ebola virus and no proven treatment, only public health measures like contact tracing can bring the outbreak under control. ➡️ Rapid and accurate diagnostics are essential: Health workers need to know who has the virus so they can isolate infected people away from uninfected ones and trace contacts.

- ⚠️ People who come to a health center with symptoms that could be Ebola will be isolated together — even though some may have typhoid or malaria, which can present with similar symptoms — and ⚠️ end up infected with Ebola at the place they came for care. ⚠️ That fear, in turn, discourages people who fall ill from seeking out care and increases the chances they will infect others in their communities.

- ⚠️ “There is no way to work on this disease without having diagnostics that are promptly accessible, and 🚨 we do not have rapid tests,” said Carmen Pérez Casas, the head of pandemic preparedness at Unitaid, a global health agency that funds accelerated access to diagnostics. 🚨 Confronting Ebola without a way to test, she said, “is terrifying.”

- Now, health workers, research labs and test developers are racing to meet the need, with some small improvement. Dr. Samuel-Roger Kamba, ⚠️ Congo’s health minister, told journalists in Bunia, the Ituri capital, on Saturday that ⚠️ testing is no longer delayed. ⚠️ “We have everything we need to cover current testing needs,” he said. ⚠️ “Today, all the samples that arrived — and we had about 71 yesterday — have all already been examined.”

- ➡️ In Bunia, the lab is now testing 150 samples per day, on four machines that screen for the genes of the virus, with no backlog.

- But ➡️ most of the samples come from sick people already in clinics, and ➡️ there is still little contact tracing in the community, the World Health Organization says. ➡️ Many hundreds of samples would need to be collected and tested within hours to bring the outbreak under control.

- In May, ➡️ the researchers at the national laboratory in Kinshasa who first identified Bundibugyo as the source of the outbreak used a genetic testing technology called ➡️ RADI-One, which can screen for all four Ebola species that affect humans as well as Marburg virus, another hemorrhagic fever that has caused outbreaks in the region.

- ➡️ The W.H.O. is working with the manufacturer of RADI-One, a small South Korean firm called KH Medical, to install about a dozen more machines in the region, said Dr. Nicksy Gumede-Moeletsi, a medical virologist with the organization.

- ➡️ Expanded access to this testing will address only part of the problem in Congo because ➡️ it relies on taking samples to a central lab — a slow and often fraught process in Ituri, where the road network is limited and violence persists.

- 🚨 There is no rapid test for Ebola like the home tests that became popular during the coronavirus pandemic — kits that would allow health workers in Ituri to quickly separate potential Ebola patients from uninfected people in clinics, and simplify contact tracing. While rapid tests for the virus do exist, they were designed for the Zaire species — and in any case, 🚨 because of the way Ebola viruses behave in the body, a rapid test cannot accurately identify sick people until their viral load is extremely high. ➡️ Such a test could, however, be used to confirm Ebola in people who have already died.

- But while the need for better tests has been clear for years, there has been little investment to develop them because there is no high-income market, said Sonjelle Shilton, who works on access to diagnostics for the aid group Doctors Without Borders.

- “That message was there: ➡️ We need pan-species Ebola tests — because they faced these same problems in the last Bundibugyo outbreak,” Ms. Shilton said. But ➡️ the private sector sees little incentive to invest in research and development for a diagnostic tool that will be used almost exclusively in the world’s poorest places, ➡️ the same reason there are no vaccines or treatments to deploy against Bundibugyo, she said.

- Until this outbreak, the RADI-One technology was not nearly as widely installed in Congo as the world’s most-used molecular diagnostic, GeneXpert.

- ➡️ The tests that originally came up negative for Ebola in the current outbreak were GeneXpert, which is made by the California-based company Cepheid. International funding helped install that technology in laboratories for testing during the coronavirus pandemic, and for H.I.V. and tuberculosis programs.

- However the GeneXpert test that Congolese labs are equipped for detects only the Zaire species of the Ebola virus, which has caused the largest outbreaks in the past.

- ➡️ Cepheid does have a test to detect Bundibugyo as well as other Ebola species. ➡️ The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved it for use by the U.S. Defense Department.

- Dr. Connie Savor, the chief medical officer for Cepheid, said ➡️ the company was committed to producing an initial run of 5,000 tests to respond to this outbreak. ➡️ But the test will have to be approved by regulators in Congo and recommended by the W.H.O. before it can be deployed. The slow-moving bureaucracy of these institutions has delayed response in other outbreaks, including Congo’s continuing mpox epidemic.

- “It comes down to, how quickly we can deploy across the different rules and different partners and the requirements of the countries: It could be a matter of weeks or months,” Dr. Savor said.

- She said it would be “premature” to discuss the price Cepheid would charge for these tests.

- Adam Hong, the chief executive of KH Medical, the company that makes the RADI-One tests, said the company was increasing its manufacturing capacity and expanding support activities in Congo and Uganda to respond to the Bundibugyo outbreak.

- While there is limited commercial market for these diagnostics, his company is committed to developing tests for pathogens that mostly affect people in the poorest places, Mr. Hong said. “We believe that strengthening access to diagnostics for emerging and neglected infectious diseases is an essential component of global health security,” he said.

By Stephanie Nolen
Declan Walsh contributed reporting from Bunia, Democratic Republic of Congo.
https://t.co/jTiiEc4Hgk

[K-in-CT 😷😷😷 @KinCONN]

#ebola
🚨 [If “as many as 20% of case-patients are healthcare workers” it would seem prudent to immediately  improve the level of PPE & take all precautions.]

➡️ 🇨🇩🇺🇬 WHO drastically downsizes Ebola case count in DR Congo outbreak

- Yesterday and today, the WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ➡️ reduced the official case count of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda ➡️ from nearly 1,000 cases to 321 confirmed cases, including 48 deaths in the DRC.

- ➡️ Another 116 cases are suspected. ➡️ In Uganda, the new case count is 11 confirmed cases, one confirmed death, one probable case, and one probable death.

- But rather than signaling good news, relief organizations caution that ➡️ the mixed messaging is part of a broader, chaotic picture of an outbreak that may have been simmering for months and could take several more months to contain.

- Sebushishe, MD, from the International Medical Corps in the DRC city of Goma, told CBS news today that ⚠️ as many as 20% of case-patients ⚠️ are healthcare workers and that ➡️ it could be “beyond six months before this outbreak could be put under control. I think the outbreak is outpacing the current response, and there are adjustments being made to catch up.”

- 2 Brazilian patients test negative

- In Brazil, two patients with suspected Ebola infections after recent travel to the DRC received negative test results. Similarly, a suspected case-patient in Italy has also tested negative for the deadly virus.

- The current Ebola outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo strain, which has no targeted vaccine or therapeutics.

By Stephanie Soucheray
https://t.co/w7PNPuewN3

[James Pethokoukis ⏩️⤴️ @JimPethokoukis]

"We have a vaccine that prevents shingles, a vaccine that markedly lowers the risk of dementia, and a vaccine that might even slow aging itself. Conveniently, these three vaccines are actually just one: the shingles vaccine. But fewer than half of eligible Americans have received the vaccine." https://t.co/VKyZMDHJdj

[Mia Farrow @FarrowMia40582]

My God

[K-in-CT 😷😷😷 @KinCONN]

@mrmickme2 @BNOFeed Like magic! 💫✨