THIS IS SERIOUS; Ivory Coast prepared to forfeit 2015 Africa Cup of Nations tie

Ivory Coast are prepared to forfeit their 2015 Africa Cup of Nations qualifier at home to Sierra Leone because of fears over Ebola.

The match is scheduled to be played in Abidjan on 6 September but the Ivorian government has forbidden it.

Sierra Leone is one of five nations where the virus has spread.

"There is the option of relocating the game or even the option of forfeiting," Ivory Coast Football Federation spokesman Malick Tohe said.

In an attempt to minimise any risk of importing Ebola into Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone have named a squad of players based outside the country.

It also gave assurances that all the coaching staff travelling from Sierra Leone would be screened for the disease before departure.

The Confederation of African Football said on Thursday that as far it is concerned the game would be played in Abidjan as schedule. 

It is unclear whether Ivory Coast would be permitted to simply forfeit the tie against Sierra Leone and continue the qualifying campaign or if there might be further sanctions imposed.

West Africa Ebola outbreak could infect 20,000 people, WHO says

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa could infect more than 20,000 people, the U.N. health agency said on Thursday, warning that an international effort costing almost half a billion dollars is needed to overcome the outbreak.

As the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced its strategic plan for combatting the virus, GlaxoSmithKline said an experimental Ebola vaccine is being fast-tracked into human studies and it plans to produce up to 10,000 doses for emergency deployment if the results are good.

The WHO estimates it will take six to nine months to halt the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, while Nigeria said on Thursday that a doctor involved in treating the Liberian-American who brought the disease to the country had died in Port Harcourt, Africa's largest energy hub, although the cause had yet to be confirmed.

So far 3,069 cases have been reported in the outbreak but the WHO said the actual number in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria could already be two to four times higher.

"This is not a West Africa issue. This is a global health security issue," Bruce Aylward, the WHO's Assistant Director-General for Polio, Emergencies and Country Collaboration, told reporters in Geneva.

With a fatality rate of 52 percent, the death toll stood at 1,552 as of Aug. 26. That is nearly as high as the total from all recorded outbreaks since Ebola was discovered in what is now Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976.

The figures do not include deaths from a separate Ebola outbreak announced at the weekend in Congo, which has been identified as a different strain of the virus.

Aylward said tackling the epidemic would cost an estimated $490 million, involving thousands of local staff and 750 international experts. "It is a big operation. We are talking (about) well over 12,000 people operating over multiple geographies and high-risk circumstances. It is an expensive operation," he said.

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The operation marks a major ramping up of the response by the WHO, which had been accused by some aid agencies of reacting too slowly to the outbreak.

A wider United Nations -led plan being launched by the end of September is expected to provide support for the secondary effects of the outbreak on food security, water, sanitation, primary and secondary healthcare and education, the WHO said.

EXPERIMENTAL DRUGS

Early this month, the WHO called the current Ebola outbreak an "international health emergency". Concerns that the disease could spread beyond West Africa have led to the use of drugs still under development for the treatment of a handful of cases.

Two American health workers, who contracted Ebola while treating patients in Liberia, received an experimental therapy called ZMapp, a cocktail of antibodies made by tiny California biotech Mapp Biopharmaceutical. They recovered and were released from hospital last week.

The virus has already killed an unprecedented number of health workers and is still being spread in a many places, the agency said. About 40 percent of the cases have occurred within the past 21 days, WHO statistics showed.

Previous Ebola outbreaks have mainly occurred in isolated areas of Central Africa. However the current epidemic has spread to three West African capitals and Lagos, Africa's biggest city. The WHO said special attention would need to be given to stopping transmission in capital cities and major ports.

Authorities in Nigeria announced the death in Port Harcourt, the oil industry hub of Africa's largest crude exporter, of one of the doctors who treated Patrick Sawyer, a U.S. citizen who died in Lagos after flying in from Liberia last month.

Health Ministry spokesman Dan Nwomeh wrote in his Twitter feed that 70 people who had been in contact with Sawyer were now under observation in the town. Aylward said the deceased doctor had not yet been confirmed as being infected with Ebola.

According to new figures released on Thursday, Nigeria has recorded 17 cases, including six deaths, from Ebola, since Sawyer collapsed upon arrival at Lagos airport in late July.

AID EFFORT CHOKED OFF

The Lagos case contributed to the decision by a number of airlines to halt services to Ebola-affected countries. Air France said on Wednesday it had suspended flights to Sierra Leone on the advice of the French government.

The WHO has advised against travel bans and border closures, which some countries in the region have also implemented, saying they risked creating food and supply shortages.

"We assume current airline limitations will stop within the next couple of weeks. This is absolutely vital," Aylward said. "Right now the aid effort risks being choked off."

West African health ministers meeting in Ghana on Thursday echoed the WHO's concerns and called for the reopening of borders and an end to flight bans.

SOURCE: YAHOO NEWS

Perfect storm' for Ebola to spread,

Paris (AFP) - Peter Piot, the Belgian scientist who co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976, on Tuesday said a "perfect storm" in West Africa had given the disease a chance to spread unchecked.

"We have never seen an (Ebola) epidemic on this scale," Piot was quoted by the French daily Liberation as saying.

"In the last six months, we have been witnessing what can be described as a 'perfect storm' everything is there for it to snowball."

The epidemic "is exploding in countries where health services are not functioning, ravaged by decades of civil war," Piot said.

"In addition, the public is deeply suspicious of the authorities. Trust must be restored. Nothing can be done in an epidemic like Ebola if there is no trust."

Piot is former chief of the UN agency UNAIDS and now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, one of the world's foremost centres of expertise on tropical disease.

In the interview, he also castigated "the extraordinary slowness" of international organisations in responding to the outbreak.

"The World Health Organization (WHO) only woke up in July," whereas the epidemic began in December last year and health experts sounded the alarm in early March, said Piot.

"There is now leadership but it is late," he said.

The epidemic has killed 1,427 people out of more than 2,600 known cases of infection, with doctors and nurses paying a particularly heavy price.

The epidemic is focussed on Liberia and Sierra Leone, which were wracked by conflict in the 1990s and the early part of the last decade, and on neighbouring Guinea.

Other cases have been recorded in Nigeria, whose north is hit by unrest, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose east is in the grip of a decades-old conflict and where Ebola was first identified in 1976.

DRC Health Minister Felix Kabanga Numbi last Sunday said that the country's seventh recorded Ebola outbreak had "no link to (the epidemic) in west Africa

Source: YAHOO NEWS 

NOT NOW,NOT NEVER: Beyoncé and Jay Z Hush Divorce Rumors

After a flawless performance; hip hop's royal couple show the world that there's no trouble in paradise.

After performing almost every song off of her self-titled fifth album, Beyonce ended her Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award performance at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards with fireworks—and we don't mean pyro.

The sparks that flew on stage were between Beyoncé and her husband, Jay who presented her with the prestigious award along with their 2-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy. Under normal circumstances a kiss between husband and wife would just be a kiss, but since the tabloids, blogs and news outlets have had them in couples therapy and on the road to divorce since the elevator incident with Solange, tonight's smooch made a statement.

If their affection wasn't enough to convince you, then believe in Beyoncé's words when she accepted her award and said, "Blue, I love you. My beloved, I love you." And in an instant, all of the rumors have been put to rest.

Doctor given experimental Ebola drug dies in Liberia

A Liberian doctor who received one of the last known doses of an experimental Ebola drug has died, officials said Monday. Separately, Canada said it has yet to send out an untested vaccine that the government is donating

Ebola has left more than 1,400 people dead across West Africa, underscoring the urgency for developing potential ways to stop and treat the disease. However, health experts warn these drugs and vaccines have not undergone the rigorous testing that usually takes place before they are used.

The experimental vaccines are at still at a Canadian laboratory, said Patrick Gaebel, spokesman for the Public Health Agency of Canada, who declined to speculate how many weeks it could be before those are given to volunteers.

"We are now working with the (World Health Organization) to address complex regulatory, logistical and ethical issues so that the vaccine can be safely and ethically deployed as rapidly as possible," Gaebel said.

Earlier this month, Canada said it would donate 800 to 1,000 doses of an Ebola vaccine that it developed. Likely candidates include health care workers treating Ebola patients.

The experimental drug known as ZMapp has been tried in only six people. Health experts caution that since ZMapp was never tested in humans, it is unclear whether it works. The small supply is now said to be exhausted and it is expected to be months before more can be produced.

Dr. Abraham Borbor, the deputy chief medical doctor at Liberia's largest hospital, had received ZMapp, along with two other Liberians. He "was showing signs of improvement but yesterday he took a turn for the worse," and died Sunday, Information Minister Lewis Brown told The Associated Press.

There was no update provided Monday on the other two Liberians who received the drug.

Earlier, it had been given to two Americans aid workers and a Spanish missionary priest, who died after he left Liberia. After receiving rigorous medical care in the U.S., the Americans survived the virus that has killed about half of its victims.

Ebola can cause a grisly death with bleeding from the eyes, mouth and ears. The virus can only be transmitted through direct contact with the bodily fluids of the sick or from touching victims' bodies, leaving doctors and other health care workers most vulnerable to contracting it.

International relief efforts have included shipments of gloves, gowns, face masks and other protective equipment, although it's not clear how many have reached health workers struggling to contain the epidemic in West Africa, where even such basics as sterile fluids can be in short supply.

But just getting enough gear isn't the whole story: Health workers can infect themselves while taking off contaminated equipment if they don't do it properly, a trio of infectious disease experts wrote Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine.

"The physical exhaustion and emotional fatigue that come with caring for patients infected with Ebola may further increase the chance of an inadvertent exposure to bodily fluids on the outside of the" personal protective equipment, wrote Dr. William A. Fisher II of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, along with Drs. Trish Perl and Noreen Hynes of Johns Hopkins University.

"In addition, the impulse to wipe away sweat in the ever-present hot, humid environment" after taking off some gear, and before washing up, could be enough, they added.

Meanwhile, the family of 29-year-old William Pooley, the first British citizen confirmed to be infected with Ebola, said he is receiving excellent care at an isolation ward in London's Royal Free Hospital after being evacuated from the capital of Sierra Leone.

"We could not ask for him to be in a better place," they said in a statement.

Pooley, a volunteer nurse, was flown back to Britain from Sierra Leone where he was working at an Ebola treatment center

The WHO is also in the process of trying to evacuate a Senegalese doctor who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone, said WHO Assistant Director General, Dr. Keiji Fukada on Monday.

The U.N. on Monday also spoke out against the limitations placed on flights into and out of the affected countries, saying they are slowing aid organizations' work in sending personnel and equipment and contributing to the countries' "economic and diplomatic isolation."

"We shouldn't do anything that stokes fear and stigmatization," Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general, told reporters.

On Monday, Japan also said it is ready to provide a newly developed anti-influenza drug as a possible treatment Ebola. The drug, with the brand name Avigan, was developed by Fujifilm subsidiary Toyama Chemical Co. to treat new and re-emerging influenza viruses, and has not been proven to be effective against Ebola.

Source: YAHOO NEWS

UNIQUE! NOT GALLYWOOD BUT 'CINEKAMBIYA'

                                           'CINEKAMBIA'  FOR GAMBIA FILM INDUSTRY!

Where you hoping for GALLYWOOD for our own film industry? Did you ever imagine that you will get a unique name for your own film industry? Well, the news is here. PRINCE BUBACARR AMINATA SANKANU Disclose to the public

After going through submitted proposals, I am glad to inform all and sundry that I have settled for this design by James Kolawole as the official logo for our Gambian Film Industry, till further notice.

I will be liaising with the National Centre for Arts and Culture (NCAC) and the Gambia Film Producers Association on the modalities of launching it formally.

In the meantime, all stakeholders, namely regulators, cultural officers, producers, actors, actresses, directors, scriptwriters, cultural and entertainment journalists, editors, designers, researchers, critics, marketing executives, promoters, event organizers, DJs, moderators, students and lovers of African films, are humbly requested to be using the term “CINEKAMBIYA” when talking about the Gambian Film Industry.

The logo is open for reproduction through media outlets, DVD covers, film posters, T-shirts and related merchandizing items, artiste pictures and all other legitimate means aimed at popularizing the CINEKAMBIYA brand at home and abroad.

There is no international law or convention that makes it compulsory for every film industry in the world to have the “wood” suffix on its name as with the Hollywood, “Bollywood” “Nollywood” and “Gollywood” bandwagons. We in The Gambia should follow our own unique path while embracing the best practices from across the globe. Hollywood has the star system. The Nigerians have the marketer system. The French and other Europeans have the director system. We in The Gambia are going to have the producer system in our CINEKAMBIYA industry.

I therefore coined the name CINEKAMBIYA for our own film industry to stand out and celebrate our Gambian peculiarities. CINE is a short form of “CINEMA ARTS” and “KAMBIYA” is the traditional Mandinka name of “KAMBIYA BOLONGHO” to also mean “Land of River Gambia.”  Acceptability is not a problem since we Gambians are, for example, using the Mandinka word “Dalasi” to describe our national currency as a good precedence for indigenization.

I would like to thank the Director General of the National Centre for Arts and Culture (NCAC) Baba Ceesay and his staff, notably the Performing Arts Director Sheikh Omar Jallow and Performing Arts Officer Matty Jobe for approving the CINEKAMBIYA name and my related proposals for the development of our national film industry.

My sincere gratitude goes to George F. Gomez and members of inter-ministerial Standing Committee on Beauty Pageants and Production of Movies for considering my draft “Gambia National Film Policy Framework” and “Code of Ethics” for practitioners as working documents for their final guidelines for our audio visual and creative industry that will be tabled before the Minister of Tourism and Culture for highest level approval and integration into our national development blueprint.

Allow me to thank Germany for once again giving me another post graduate scholarship for the academic of 2014/2015. This time for advanced studies in the liberal arts field that will add value to the Gambian creative industry upon my graduation.

Further appreciation goes to all the executives and my fellow members of our Gambia Film Producers Association (GFPA) as well as all practitioners who are cooperating with me in making sure we do not fall into the counterproductive trap of rushing to flood the markets with DVDs without first building the structures for a sustainable industry.

You don’t build a film industry overnight and the examples of those who tried to copy the quickie “nollywood” model should serve as eye-openers. From the days of “Vinasha production”, “Banjul cops”, “mirror boy” and other rushed projects that generated a lot of hype before leading to disappointments, I believe people can now see the dangers of putting the cart before the horse.

This CINEKAMBIYA branding is part of my permanent master plan for the development of our own vibrant Gambia film industry that needs structures and standards.  The National Centre for Arts and Culture (NCAC) can bear me witness that I have slowed down my own film projects to give priority to the structural development of the film industry as whole.

People can produce or act in ten and more different movies but that will remain meaningless until and unless they show tangible benefits and trickle down effects in the overall development of the industry.

So I am putting the structure firsts. More is coming from me, one step a time. Next, I will be unveiling other important structures for the industry as part of the promise for local capacity building package I made to the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Momodou Joof, during my audience with him in 2012.

Prince Bubacarr Aminata SANKANU

Film Producer, Director and Creative Industry Strategist

Source: Picture: Creative Film Industry Strategist Sankanu:

Trayvon Martin’s Mum Pens Heartbreaking Letter To Michael Brown’s Family

                          WORDS OF COMFORT

In 2012, a 17-year-old African-American boy Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by a Sanford, Florida volunteer neighbourhood watcher George Zimmerman.

 On the evening of February 26th, Trayvon went to a convenience store and purchased candy and juice, as he returned, Zimmerman called the police and told them that Trayvon looked suspicious.

 There was an altercation moments later and Zimmerman shot the unarmed teen in the chest. He died.

 Trayon Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton wrote a heartbreaking letter to the family of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, who was shot at least six times by a police officer.

She begins with, “I wish I had a word of automatic comfort but I don’t. I wish I could say that it will be alright on a certain or specific day but I can’t. I wish that all of the pain that I have endured could possibly ease some of yours but it won’t. What I can do for you is what has been done for me: pray for you then share my continuing journey as you begin yours.”

 Sybrina who also experienced a devastating time after her son’s death continues, saying:

“I hate that you and your family must join this exclusive yet growing group of parents and relatives who have lost loved ones to senseless gun violence. Of particular concern is that so many of these gun violence cases involve children far too young. But Michael is much more than a police/gun violence case; Michael is your son. A son that barely had a chance to live. Our children are our future so whenever any of our children – black, white, brown, yellow, or red – are taken from us unnecessarily, it causes a never-ending pain that is unlike anything I could have imagined experiencing.

SOURCE: huffingtonpost.com

EBOLA DEATH IN SIERRA LEONE TRACED BACK TO A TRADITIONAL HEALER

Sierra Leone's 365 Ebola deaths traced back to one healer

Kenema (Sierra Leone)  - It has laid waste to the tribal chiefdoms of Sierra Leone, leaving hundreds dead, but the Ebola crisis began with just one healer's claims to special powers.

The outbreak need never have spread from Guinea, health officials revealed to AFP, except for a herbalist in the remote eastern border village of Sokoma.

"She was claiming to have powers to heal Ebola. Cases from Guinea were crossing into Sierra Leone for treatment," Mohamed Vandi, the top medical official in the hard-hit district of Kenema, told AFP.

"She got infected and died. During her funeral, women around the other towns got infected."

Ebola has killed more than 1,220 people since it emerged in southern Guinea at the start of the year, spreading first to Liberia and cutting a gruesome and gory swathe through eastern Sierra Leone since May.

The tropical pathogen can turn people into de facto corpses with little higher brain function and negligible motor control days before they die.

The virus attacks almost every section of tissue, reducing organs and flesh in the most aggressive infections to a pudding-like mush which leaches or erupts from the body.

The virus is highly infectious through exposure to bodily fluids, and its early rapid spread in West Africa was attributed in part to relatives touching victims during traditional funeral rites.

The herbalist's mourners fanned out across the rolling hills of the Kissi tribal chiefdoms, starting a chain reaction of infections, deaths, funerals and more infections.

A worrying outbreak turned into a major epidemic when the virus finally hit Kenema city on June 17.

An ethnically-diverse, Krio-speaking city of 190,000, Kenema already has the highest incidence of Lassa fever -- another viral haemorrhagic disease -- in the world.

But the brutality and cold efficiency of the Ebola virus -- described in medical literature as a "molecular shark" -- caught the city's shabby, chaotic hospital off-guard.

'Deadly and unforgiving' -

Crumpled photographs of dead nurses cover notice boards on the flaking walls outside the maternity unit and in the administration block.

Twelve nurses have been among 277 people to die since the first case showed up in Kenema hospital. A further ten have been infected with Ebola and survived.

"The nurses who lost their lives and those who got infected would never have gone in knowing that they would get infected," Vandi, the district medical officer, told AFP.

"We are fighting a battle that is new. Ebola is new here and we are all learning as we go along."

The first case at the hospital was a woman who had partially miscarried, having probably passed the virus to her unborn child.

The facility boasts the only Lassa fever isolation unit in the world, set apart from the main building, and a makeshift Ebola unit was quickly set up there.

It was then that the nurses began dying.

As head sister of the Lassa fever ward for more than 25 years, Mbalu Fonnie was credited with attending to more haemorrhagic fever patients than anyone in the world.

She had survived Lassa fever herself, but was no match for the Ebola virus when it got into her bloodstream from a patient in July.

She was dead within days, along with fellow nurses Alex Moigboi and Iye Gborie, and ambulance driver Sahr Niokor.

The deaths prompted a strike of 100 nurses, who complained of poor management of the Ebola centre.

"Wherever the Ebola virus strikes for the first time, there is a heavy toll on healthcare workers because they don't have experience with it," Vandi told AFP.

"The Ebola virus is deadly and unforgiving. The slightest mistake you make, you will get infected."

SOURCE: YAHOO NEWS

LUIS SUAREZ CONTROVERSIES

June 2014: Banned for four months from any football-related activity,plus nine international matches,for biting Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini

April 2013: Apologies for biting Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic and receives a 10-game ban

December 2011: Given eight-match suspension and fined £40,000 for racially abusing Manchester United's Patrice Evra

November 2010: Given seven-match ban for biting PSV Eindhoven's Otman Bakkal on the shoulder while playing for Ajax

REPENTANCE OF A BITING ADDICT

Luis Suarez: I won't bite again in the future

Barcelona striker Luis Suarez says he has talked to specialists about his behaviour and insists there will be no further biting incidents.

Suarez is serving a four-Month ban for biting Italy's Giorgio Chiellini at the World Cup -his third biting offence.

"I say to fans, don't worry, because I won't do that anymore," he promised.

"I spoke to my psychologist and he said I had to face it and say sorry. I did - now I would rather focus on the present, which is Barcelona."

The 27-year-old Uruguay striker, who said he was "really depressed" after the incident in Brazil, launched an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport against the ban.

Following the verdict, the former Liverpool striker is still banned from playing in competitive fixtures until late October and must also serve the remaining eight games of his nine-match international ban.

But Suarez is no longer exclude from "all football-related activities" which allowed him to make his Barcelona debut as a 75th-minute substitute in the 6-0 friendly victory over Mexican side Club Leon on Monday.

Addressing a media conference on Tuesday, he said of his behavioural issues: "I am speaking to professionals - the right professionals. But it is a private matter and I don't want to comment further on that."

Suarez spent three years with Liverpool, during which he was banned for eight matches  for racially abusing Manchester United's Patrice Evra and suspended for a further 10 matches  for biting Branislav Ivanovic of Chelsea.

Last month, he joined Barcelona for a reported fee of £75m but the Catalan club's vice president Jordi Mestre said on Tuesday the actual amount was significantly less.

"Negotiations started before the World Cup and we worked hard to come to a final figure of £65m. We were originally quoted over €90m (£72m).

"He had much better offers than ours financially but he wanted to come to Barcelona. He made a great effort - financially and personally - to be here."

Suarez admitted he feared for his career after the incident with Chiellini in Uruguay's 1-0 win in Natal on 24 June.

"Of course I was concerned - not just about the transfer to Barcelona but more for me as a person. But, as I've said, that's in the past now and I'm trying to concentrate on Barcelona," he said.

"Everything that happens in the past, that needs to be forgotten. If I start thinking about everything I've gone through, I wouldn't be able to sleep.