CDC Director Thomas Frieden, who is in Liberia to assess the Ebola outbreak, said today the contagion is "even worse than we'd feared."

"This is an absolute emergency," Frieden told WSB Radio in a phone interview this morning. "We have never seen anything on this scale with Ebola before. Unfortunately, this situation is going to get worse before it gets better. We've not yet turned the tide. The outbreak is ahead of our response."

Frieden, who heads the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Liberia desperately needs to set up treatment centers across the country that can safely handle Ebola patients, giving the patients a chance to survive and also keeping them out of the community, where they can spread the virus to others.

"We've seen patients with Ebola with nowhere to go, an increasing number of corpses put onto the street," Frieden said. "A whole system of picking up and cremating corpses has had to be developed."

Cremation, which was not culturally acceptable in Liberia before the outbreak, is now widespread practice, the CDC chief said.

The death toll in Liberia and neighboring Guinea and Sierra Leone now stands at 1,427, the World Health Organization said, with total infections of about 2,600 since the outbreak was identified in March.

Li Luming carefully straightens a table cloth in his empty restaurant in Sierra Leone's capital as he laments the damage Ebola has done to business.

It is a pointless gesture -- the table, like dozens in the "Beijing Restaurant", has not been used for weeks -- but it is important to keep going, to show the staff that it's "business as usual".

A favourite of locals and Chinese expatriates alike for more than a decade, the restaurant has seen just a handful of customers since June.

"With Ebola, everyone is afraid. No one wants to go out," 50-year-old Li tells AFP at the 70-cover eaterie in Freetown's Murray Town district.

Li has been in the capital for two decades but, like many entrepreneurs in the once-thriving and influential Chinese community, he is thinking of packing it in and heading back home.

"Before Ebola, all the Chinese and some foreigners came here to eat. Now nobody comes. We have no customers. We may have to close," he says.

Ebola, a virulent tropical haemorrhagic fever, has claimed almost 1,500 lives since the start of the year in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria.

Eastern Sierra Leone has been particularly hard-hit, but a death in Freetown has spread fear that the capital could be in line for a wave of cases.

A second World Health Organisation (WHO) staff member has been infected with Ebola in West Africa and will be evacuated to Germany, health officials said Wednesday. The announcement comes a day after the WHO shut a laboratory in Sierra Leone, after a Senegalese epidemiologist was infected with the deadly virus.

The unnamed WHO worker will be treated in a university hospital in Hamburg-Eppendorf, hospital spokesman Rico Schmidt told dpa.

The patient was expected to land in the northern city of Hamburg Wednesday and be transferred to the hospital in an isolated emergency vehicle.

It was unclear in which West African country the WHO worker had been infected with the virus.

The Ebola death toll across West Africa had risen to 1,427 by August23, according to the WHO, with a total of 2,615 suspected or confirmed cases in the region.

Japanese officials are ready to provide an anti-flu drug as a potential treatment to fight the rapidly-expanding Ebola outbreak.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that Japan can offer the favipiravir tablet, developed by a subsidiary of Fujifilm Holdings, any time at the request of the World Health Organisation.

The drug, developed by Fujifilm subsidiary Toyama Chemical to treat novel and re-emerging influenza viruses, was approved by the Japanese health ministry in March.

Fujifilm spokesman Takao Aoki said ebola and influenza viruses are the same type and theoretically similar effects can be expected on Ebola.

He said the drug has also proved effective in lab experiments on mice.

Fujifilm said it has favipiravir stock for more than 20,000 patients.

The company is also in talks with the US Food and Drug Administration on clinical testing of the drug in treating Ebola.

Some very damning evidence has come forward that the ingredient triclosan, originally registered as a pesticide but used in more modern times in a wide array of hygiene products, is an endocrine disruptor that may also cause other health issues like cancer, thyroid dysfunction, and infertility just to name a few.

Now that this has come to light, Colgate still refuses to remove the compound from its number one best-selling toothpaste, Total. After all, the company spent $38 million dollars and ten years getting it approved. In fact, Colgate continues to laud its FDA approval for Total some 17 years ago, while the FDA says that even though more studies have shown up in the meantime that merit further review (you know, whenever they get around to that), the agency does admit, "Animal studies have shown that triclosan alters hormone regulation." But FDA goes on to say, "However, data showing effects in animals don't always predict effects in humans."

A person's home is their castle, and they populate it with their own subjects: millions and millions of bacteria.

A study published tomorrow in Science provides a detailed analysis of the microbes that live in houses and apartments. The study was conducted by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago.

The results shed light on the complicated interaction between humans and the microbes that live on and around us. Mounting evidence suggests that these microscopic, teeming communities play a role in human health and disease treatment and transmission.

"We know that certain bacteria can make it easier for mice to put on weight, for example, and that others influence brain development in young mice," said Argonne microbiologist Jack Gilbert, who led the study. "We want to know where these bacteria come from, and as people spend more and more time indoors, we wanted to map out the microbes that live in our homes and the likelihood that they will settle on us.

"They are essential for us to understand our health in the 21st century," he said.

The Home Microbiome Project followed seven families, which included eighteen people, three dogs and one cat, over the course of six weeks. The participants in the study swabbed their hands, feet and noses daily to collect a sample of the microbial populations living in and on them. They also sampled surfaces in the house, including doorknobs, light switches, floors and countertops.

As concerns about health epidemics plague the nation, demand and sales of diet soda have plunged as consumers try to make better choices. As we reported yesterday, aspartame - the main sweetener for diet soda - is one of the most dangerous ingredients used in our food supply, causing seizures and a host of other health issues.

In a new study done over ten years and sampling 60,000 women, it was shown that women who drink two or more diet drinks a day have much higher cardiovascular disease rates and are more likely to die from the disease.

CDC Whistleblower William Thomas has released a formal statement confirming the original study found a link between MMR and Autism, especially in African American and that the CDC hid the results.

A top researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr William Thompson, admits he played a key role in helping uncover data manipulation by the CDC. This fraud obscured a higher incidence of autism in African-American boys due to the MMR vaccine. The whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson, came forward after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for original data on an autism study was filed and these highly sensitive documents were received with the assistance of U.S. Representative Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The CDC documents and discussions with the whistleblower reveal widespread manipulation of scientific data and top-down pressure on CDC scientists to suppress a causal link between the MMR vaccine and later autism diagnosis, particularly in a subset of African-American males who received their immunization "on-time" in accordance with the recommended CDC schedule.

The received documents from the CDC show that in 2003 a 340% risk of autism in African American boys related to the MMR vaccine was discovered and then hidden due to pressure from senior officials. The CDC researchers then recalculated their results by removing a population to get the results that were desired. Even with the recalculated data from the original report a significant risk of autism due to the MMR is found and can be seen in the IOM presentation of the original study, highlighted on page 29 and 31 [PDF].

Stephen Gire and other health researchers on the ground in Africa had some hope that the Ebola outbreak was coming under control or at least plateauing in late May. Then came the funeral of a healer in Guinea. More than a dozen of the mourners contracted the disease there, probably by washing or touching the body, and took it to Sierra Leone, according to a new DNA mapping of the Ebola virus that scientists hope will help them understand what makes this killer tick.

"You had this huge burst after it looked like the outbreak was starting to die down," Gire said. "It sort of threw a wrench in the response."

Ebola exploded after that funeral and has now killed at least 1,552 people in West Africa. It's probably more than that, with 40 percent of the cases in the last three weeks, according to the World Health Organization. WHO officials said Thursday the outbreak continues to accelerate and could reach more than 20,000 cases eventually.

Gire and more than 50 colleagues - five of whom died from Ebola while fighting the outbreak in Africa - have mapped the genetic code of this strain of Ebola, and in so doing showed how crucial that May funeral was. They hope to use that to track mutations that could become more worrisome the longer the outbreak lasts. This detailed genetic mapping also could eventually make a bit of a difference in the way doctors spot and fight the disease, especially with work in preliminary vaccines.

On Thursday, officials at the National Institutes of Health announced that they were launching safety trials on a preliminary vaccine for Ebola. Researchers have already checked that still-not-tested vaccine against some of the more than 350 mutations in this strain of Ebola to make sure the changes the disease is making won't undercut science's hurried efforts to fight it, said Pardis Sabeti, a scientist at Harvard University and its affiliated Broad Institute.


She and Gire, also at Broad and Harvard, are two of the lead authors of a study, published Thursday in the journal Science, that maps the killer disease strain based on specimens collected from 78 patients.

The virus has mutated more than 300 times from previous strains of Ebola, Gire said. Researchers have also pinpointed about 50 places in the genetic code where the virus has changed since this outbreak started. So far, they don't know what any of those mutations mean, but they hope to find out.

The number of people infected with the Ebola virus may surpass 20,000, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.

"The outbreak continues to accelerate. More than 40% of the total number of cases have occurred within the past 21 days," the UN health agency said in its roadmap plan issued to deal with the outbreak.

The total number of probable and confirmed cases in the current Ebola outbreak in the four affected countries (Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone) is 3,069, with 1,552 deaths, the WHO reported.