A SICK prisoner feared to be carrying the deadly Ebola virus sparked a full-scale alert.
The 20-year-old man – a suspected illegal immigrant from Eritrea – became ill at Waterlooville police station yesterday.
Staff decided at about 8am that the cells should be quarantined as a precaution until they knew what illness he was suffering from.
The area was put in lockdown with no-one allowed to enter or leave the area – where people arrested are held – for four hours.
Staff called South Central Ambulance Service (Scas) in line with force procedure.
One concerned resident, who does not want to be named, said: ‘I was supposed to go in to the police station as an appropriate adult.
‘I was informed that several people were arrested from Africa and they had been detained in Waterlooville police station and there was a possible risk of Ebola.’
A Hampshire police spokeswoman said the decision custody staff made was based on the information they had available at the time.
Police drafted in an interpreter to help medics, who established that the man does not have the Ebola virus.
Details of what illness he is suffering from have not been revealed.
The spokeswoman said: ‘A detained man became ill while in custody.
‘His illness was reported to staff just after 8am on Wednesday.
‘The man was initially examined in the custody suite and taken to hospital for further treatment.
‘The custody suite was closed as a precaution until it could be established what illness the man was suffering from.
‘The 20-year-old man from Eritrea was arrested on the A3 at Clanfield on suspicion of immigration offences.’
The suspect is among five men arrested on the A3 at Clanfield on Tuesday night.
The other four men, from Ethiopia and Eritrea and aged 20, 21, 24 and 25, were held on suspicion of immigration offences.
Eritrea and Ethiopia are in east Africa, and are not affected by the current Ebola outbreak, which has claimed almost 1,500 lives in west Africa.
Countries affected by the current outbreak include Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria.
A Scas spokeswoman added: ‘We were called at 8.06am to Swiss Road in Waterlooville to reports of a person suffering a medical emergency.
‘We sent an ambulance crew and an ambulance officer and one patient was taken to Queen Alexandra Hospital for treatment.’
Virus symptoms can be treated but there is no cure
EBOLA is a deadly virus for which there is no vaccine or cure.
But with treatment and proper hydration, patients have a chance of survival.
The virus is spread between humans through direct contact with infected bodily fluids and symptoms can include high fever, bleeding and central nervous system damage.
Volunteer nurse William Pooley, 29, of Eyke, Suffolk, is the first Briton to contract Ebola during this outbreak after being exposed to it while working with patients in Sierra Leone.
He returned to the UK on Sunday and is being kept in a special isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He has been given the experimental drug ZMapp.
Community toilets in Addis Ababa typically consist of a hole in the floor.
Addis Ababa has more than 3 million people, but there are just 63 public toilets. At one, in the oldest part of the city, there is constant activity and bustle as people queue to pay varying prices for a urinal, full cubicle or shower in the white-tiled facility inside a circular yellow building. For many, this is the only option because of the lack of provision in their own homes.
Nine in 10 households use "non-improved" toilet facilities, according to the Wash Ethiopia Movement . The most common type of non-improved toilet is an open pit latrine or pit latrine without slabs, used by 57% of households in rural areas and 43% in urban. Only one in 25 households has access to improved toilet facilities which are not shared with other households.
Mesay Berhanu, a spokesman for the movement, said: "Many people have shared toilet facilities which they would not find very comfortable. They might have to line up for some time to make use of the facilities. As a result, you may find people doing it here or there along the street."
Government figures show that diarrhoeal diseases are among the 10 most prolific in the country. "These are one way or another linked to an unhygienic environment," Berhanu added.
Waste can accumulate because service providers are stretched. "There is a huge problem in liquid waste management. The number of vehicles they have to collect it is limited. People might have to wait two or three months. We have a very small number of private operators in liquid waste collection." Progress has stalled, Berhanu said, because of bureaucracy. "A year ago there was a plan to create more than 1,000 public toilets, but there is a lack of co-ordination between different departments of government.One of the main challenges is the coordination of the various actors."
But officials in this fast-developing city say they have a 100m birr (£3m) plan to build an extra 25 public toilets within the next year along with 103 community and 289 mobile toilets, the latter equipped for pregnant women and people with disabilities. About 150 areas have been identified, including markets and bus and train stations.
Mulugeta Kemise, of the Addis Ababa Water and Sewerage Authority , said: "We are trying to improve the lot of the downtrodden masses. After five, six or seven years you'll see the difference. We are doing our best to transform the lives of our people."
At a community toilet shared by 35 households in an impoverished neighbourhood of Addis Ababa the scene is typical: behind a corrugated iron door, beside dirty scraps of paper and tissue, is a small, dark hole in the floor. Above, a cable runs to a naked lightbulb. The stench is rank. These four toilets are used by more than 200 people a day. Those who live here describe them as undignified, unhygienic and inhuman.
"They're dirty and it's not good for our health," said Berhane Keraga, 45, a housewife who gave birth eight times here. "They make a lot of men, women and children ill with typhoid and diarrhoea. A couple of months ago I got sick and had to go to hospital because of these toilets. I felt cold and shivering and had a headache and stomach ache."
The lavatories, housed in concrete blocks under a corrugated roof, encourage flies and rodents. "There are really black scary rats that come and run on our feet. It's disgusting, and when my children use these toilets I feel really bad." Nor is there separation between men and women, Keraga added: "It's undignified for women. It's difficult for me to use sanitary products. Some women urinate in bowls at home then dispose of them."
Since the toilets were built by a non-government organisation more than a decade ago they have been neglected, despite appeals to the government. The community pays 1,200 birr for waste removal once or twice a month and has recently started charging outsiders 1 birr to use them. Girma Taddese, a furniture maker, said: "These toilets are not safe, healthy or hygienic for children. A lot of people fall sick because the toilets get filled quickly. The smell is very disgusting. It fills the air and our kids play on the ground. We can't take it." Holding his two-year-old daughter, Blen Girma, he adds: "I don't like her using these toilets. I feel so sad about our lives, but we don't have a choice.
“Oh my God, I did not believe that we did what we did, but we did. It’s all there… This is the lowest point in my career, that I went along with that paper. I have great shame now when I meet families of kids with autism, because I have been part of the problem.”—CDC Whistleblower Dr. William W. Thompson, in a recorded interview with Dr. Brian Hooker.
On Aug. 19 came a bombshell revelation charging an intentional fraud at the Centers for Disease Control has put black children at greater risk of developing autism. A week has passed, and the media can’t seem to decide what to do with the story.
The advocacy group Focus Autism published on its website on Aug. 19 a press release that explained that a whistleblower inside the CDC, Dr. William W. Thompson, had helped Dr. Brian Hooker discover that a bedrock paper proving that vaccines don’t cause autism was based onfraudulent data.
The website also published a video (credited to the Autism Media Channel) documenting the amazing tale of a guilt-wracked government scientist (Thompson) and the father of an autistic child who happened to have a PhD in chemical engineering (Hooker), searching for the truth about his son’s disease.
Hooker had been examining data sets for years, trying to discover the true cause or causes of his son’s severe autism, which is a blanket term for neurological impairment.
Autism rates began rapidly rising in the 1990s (according to the CDC, in 2014 1 in 68 children in the United States has autism. In the 1970s and 1980s, the rate was 1 in 2000), and some researchers and parents of autistic children began speculating that rounds of vaccines, especially in combination, were responsible.
One day Hooker got a phone call. Thompson reached out to him—Hooker says Thompson appointed Hooker as his “priest”—and began providing clues to guide Hooker’s research.
The Focus Autism release explains how Hooker, making use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as well as a Congressional request, finally found the bombshell Thompson had wanted him to find. Upon reexamining a study published in 2004 that the CDC had used to establish the safety of the MMR vaccine, which is given to babies to inoculate them against measles, mumps, and rubella, Hooker discovered: “African American boys receiving their first MMR vaccine before 36 months of age were 3.4 (or around 236 percent) times more likely to develop autism vs. after 36 months.”
According to Hooker, the data set for the paper was altered. Data was initially gathered on 2,583 children. When the evidence pointed to a strong link between MMR and autism, the researchers found a way to cut the study group, almost in half.
They excluded any children that did not have a valid State of Georgia Birth Certificate, which reduced the cohort by 41 percent and greatly diluted the significance of the original correlation.
The resulting paper, commonly known as the DeStefano et. al. study, was published in the journal Pediatics in 2004. “[It] is widely used by the CDC and other public health organizations to support a claim that there is no link between vaccines and autism,” says the Focus Autism press release.
The study answered a purpose. In the video, Thompson complains that higher-ups wanted certain results, and he went along.
Individuals like Hooker, who had been investigating a possible link between vaccines and his son’s autism, are dismissed by the medical establishment as “anti-vaxxers” and considered a threat to public health.
Leaking Out
The story released by Focus Autism started to spread in alternative health media, like Mike Adams’ “Natural News,” and Jon Rappoport’s “NoMoreFakeNews,” which reported on Friday that Dr. Thompson had been “escorted out” of the CDC building.
Everything was quiet in the big media outlets on Thursday, but outraged parents began calling the CDC demanding answers.
On Friday, a woman in Atlanta who goes by “Bobby Dee” online and doesn’t want her real name revealed, heard about the video on Facebook, and decided to write an iReport story for CNN.
“I wrote it, I set it loose, and it started going crazy,” she told Epoch Times. Her story stayed up at CNN for 19 hours, during which time it began to go viral. It had 56,512 views, 235 comments, and 33,000 shares when CNN inexplicably pulled it. Gone.
The comments were mostly parents of afflicted children literally begging CNN to investigate, to cover this important story. Then there was a “troll”—a de-moralizer whose comments spread the official view on the safety of vaccines, over and over.
Dee was contacted by a producer at CNN, who asked her a list of questions about who she was and how she knew what she knew. Dee, wanting CNN to run with the story, provided phone numbers for the all the main sources in the story.
The producer promised it would go back up “if CNN could verify it.” The strange thing about that though, is that “iReport” is a page that states in its guidelines that contributors are on their own—rather like Facebook—and CNN is not responsible for content, and does not vet content.
The producer claimed the reason this story was receiving exceptional treatment was that it had gone “viral-ish,” so CNN needed to check it out.
Meanwhile, absurdly, Dee herself (out-doing “the most trusted name in news”) had already verified Dr. Thompson’s identity, by emailing him at CDC and getting a response.
“Thank you for your kind words,” Dr. Thompson wrote.
Epoch Times has learned that on Sunday, Aug. 25 some parents began receiving an emailed statement from the CDC reviewing the handling of the data in Destafano et. al. study. The statement stands behind that study’s conclusion: “Additional studies and a more recent rigorous review by the Institute of Medicine have found that MMR vaccine does not increase the risk of autism.”
Also on Aug. 25, a second story was posted at CNN’s “iReport,” and this time, it went down after two hours. A third story was taken down in minutes, and outrage at CNN’s behavior exploded across the social media.
On Aug. 25, midday, CNN put two of the three stories back online, but with tags saying CNN had not vetted them. Epoch Times’ calls to CNN were not returned at press time.
CNN is carrying a story on an unofficial part of its site that it has so far chosen not to cover on its own.
A google search early on the morning of Aug. 26 does not show any other mainstream media outlet has picked the story up.
Meanwhile, the latest word from an individual in a position to know is that Dr. Thompson has “lawyered up,” and is seeking official whistleblower status, so that he can talk freely about what he knows.
Celia Farber writes and lives in New York City.
Correction: The percentage likelihood of African-American boys developing autism if the receive the MMR vaccine in the first 36 months was corrected to around 236 percent. The CDC’s statement responding to the charges made by Hooker and Thompson was added to the article around 12:45 p.m. ET on Aug. 26.
Emory University Hospital in Atlanta announced early Thursday that it will discharge two Ebola patients. The hospital said one of the patients, Dr. Kent Brantly, will be present at the conference and is expected to make a statement.
An American doctor treated for Ebola, Kent Brantly, was discharged from Atlanta's Emory University Hospital today. Another American aid worker, Nancy Writebol, was discharged Tuesday.
"God saved my life," said Brantly, looking gaunt, at a press conference Thursday, at which the room applauded his appearance. He thanked his medical team and the millions of people around the world praying for his recovery. "Please do not stop praying for the people of West Africa."
Bruce Ribner, medical director of the hospital's infectious disease unit,said Brantly will go to an undisclosed location with his wife and children after the conference.
Brantly and Writebol, a volunteer with SIM USA, were flown to Emory from West Africa and were treated in the hospital's specialized unit.
Ribner said the hospital performed extensive tests on both patients and consulted with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before deciding they were ready to be released. Neither pose any risk to the public, he said.
"We are profoundly grateful for the opportunity to have applied our training, our care and our experience to meet their needs," Ribner said. "All of us who have worked with them have been impressed by their courage and determination."
Ribner said he hopes what he and his colleagues learned about treating Ebola can help save other patients in Africa.
Both Brantly and Writebol received doses of an experimental drug, called Zmapp, which includes man-made antibodies against Ebola. Although Zmapp has shown promise in animals, it has not yet been tested in humans. Experts have said it's not possible to conclude that Zmapp cured their disease, although getting good supportive care at Emory, one of the world's best hospitals, likely improved their chances of survival.
"If the question is, 'Did Zmapp do this?' The answer is that we just don't know," says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. "People who are in much less sophtisticated medical care conditions in West Africa are recovering 50% of the time."
Without a carefully designed trial -- involving a comparison group that doesn't receive the drug -- doctors can't make conclusions about how a treatment works. About half of Ebola patients in the current outbreak are surviving without the experimental drug. But a Spanish priest who received Zmapp died, Fauci says.
Three Liberian health workers also received Zmapp. The drug's manufacturer, Mapp Biopharmaceutical of San Diego, has said there is no more of the drug left.
According to CNN, two blood tests done over a two-day period had to come back negative for Ebola before Brantly could be discharged. David Writebol, Nancy's husband, was released from quarantine earlier this week. Doctors had observed him for three weeks, monitoring him for signs of fever. Ebola can have an incubation period of up to 21 days.
People generally aren't considered contagious unless they have symptoms of Ebola, such as fever.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sent at least 50 staff to West Africa to help contain the epidemic.
"We must re-commit to doing all we can to increase their chances of survival and to stop the spread of Ebola," said CDC director Thomas Frieden in a statement. "This outbreak is unprecedented, and it's likely to get worse before it gets better. We must respond in unprecedented way to stop the outbreak as soon as possible."
Samaritan's Purse, the Christian humanitarian organization for which Brantly works, released this statement from its president, Franklin Graham, Thursday morning:
Today I join all of our Samaritan's Purse team around the world in giving thanks to God as we celebrate Dr. Kent Brantly's recovery from Ebola and release from the hospital. Over the past few weeks, I have marveled at Dr. Brantly's courageous spirit as he has fought this horrible virus with the help of the highly competent and caring staff at Emory University Hospital. His faithfulness to God and compassion for the people of Africa have been an example to us all.
I know that Dr. Brantly and his wonderful family would ask that you please remember and pray for those in Africa battling, treating and suffering from Ebola. Those who have given up the comforts of home to serve the suffering and the less fortunate are in many ways just beginning this battle.
We have more than 350 staff in Liberia, and others will soon be joining them, so please pray for those who have served with Dr. Brantly -- along with the other doctors, aid workers and organizations that are at this very moment desperately trying to stop Ebola from taking any more lives.