Mandatory quarantines ordered by some U.S. states on doctors and nurses returning from West Africa's Ebola outbreak are creating a "chilling effect" on Doctors Without Borders operations there, the humanitarian group said on Thursday.

In response to questions from Reuters, the group said it is discussing whether to shorten some assignments as a result of restrictions imposed by some states since one of its American doctors, Craig Spencer, was hospitalized in New York City last week with the virus.

"There is rising anxiety and confusion among MSF staff members in the field over what they may face when they return home upon completion of their assignments in West Africa," Sophie Delaunay, executive director of Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement emailed to Reuters. Doctors Without Borders is also known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF.

Some MSF workers are delaying their return home after their assignments and staying in Europe for 21 days, Ebola's maximum incubation period, "in order to avoid facing rising stigmatization at home and possible quarantine," Delaunay said in her statement.

"Some people are being discouraged by their families from returning to the field," she said.

The governors of New York and New Jersey announced strict new screening rules at airports last Friday, including mandatory 21-day quarantines for any healthcare worker who had been treating Ebola patients in West Africa.

Only one person is known to have been quarantined as a result of the new rules, nurse Kaci Hickox, who was confined to a tent against her will for several days after arriving at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey last Friday. Hickox, 33, was returning from Sierra Leone, where she had cared for Ebola patients as an MSF healthcare worker.

Hickox, who tested negative for Ebola and says she is completely healthy, has strongly criticized the quarantine policy in New Jersey and then in her home state of Maine, where she was taken to finish her 21-day quarantine at home.

She went for a bike ride on Thursday, putting her on a collision course with Maine Governor Paul LePage, whose office said he would exercise his legal authority to keep her quarantined.

reuters

A two-year-old girl died of Ebola in Mali on Friday, in the first case of the disease in the west African nation, a source in the prime minister's office told AFP.

"Unfortunately she died between 4:00 pm and 5:00 pm," said the source, adding that the girl's death had been confirmed by the governor of the western region of Kayes.

The girl had recently returned to Mali from neighbouring Guinea, one of the countries most affected by an epidemic that has killed nearly 4,900 people.


AFP

The World Health Organization is pressing the search for an Ebola vaccine and hopes to begin testing two experimental versions as early as January on more than 20,000 front-line health care workers and others in West Africa's hot zone — a bigger rollout than envisioned just a few months ago.

An effective vaccine would not in itself be enough to stop the outbreak — for one thing, there probably won't be enough doses to go around — but it could give important protection to the medical workers who are central to the effort. More than 200 of them have died of the disease.

The WHO, which has come under fire for bungling its initial reaction to the Ebola crisis, is helping coordinate trials of two of the most promising experimental vaccines.

The real-world testing in West Africa will go forward only if the vaccines prove safe and trigger an adequate immune-system response in volunteers during clinical trials that are either underway or planned in Europe, Africa and the U.S. The preliminary safety data is expected to become available by December.

Dr. Marie Paule Kieny, an assistant director general for the U.N. health agency, acknowledged there are many "ifs" remaining — and "still a possibility that it will fail." But she sketched out a much broader experiment than was imagined only six months ago, saying WHO hopes to dispense tens of thousands of doses in the first couple of months of the new year.

"These are quite large trials," she said Tuesday.

WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib later said the agency expects 20,000 vaccinations in January and similar numbers in the months after that.

The outbreak in West Africa has killed over 4,500 people, mostly in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, since it emerged 10 months ago. Experts said the world could see 10,000 new cases a week in two months if authorities don't take stronger steps.

The vaccine push comes as Sierra Leone said Tuesday that the number of infected people in the country's western region is soaring, with more than 20 deaths a day. That region is on the opposite side of the country from where the first cases emerged.

One of the vaccines that Kieny mentioned, Okairos AG, is being developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and GlaxoSmithKline from a modified chimpanzee cold virus and an Ebola protein. It is in clinical trials now in Britain and in Mali.

GlaxoSmithKline said the vaccine is being manufactured at a plant in Rome.

"We have other vaccine facilities around the world, and we are seeing what we can do to ramp up production to commercial scale," said Mary Anne Rhyne, Glaxo's U.S. director of external communications.

The second front-runner, developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada and known as VSV-EBOV, has been sent to the U.S. Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland for testing on healthy volunteers. It will also be tested shortly among volunteers in Switzerland, Germany, Gabon and Kenya, Kieny said.

Doctors Without Borders, whose medics have been at the forefront in treating Ebola patients in West Africa, urged pharmaceutical companies to speed up their work.

"Vaccination of front-line health workers — who are among the most vulnerable people — and mass campaigns to vaccinate large numbers of people in affected and at-risk countries could make a huge difference in curbing this outbreak," the group's medical director, Bertrand Draguez, said in an interview on its website.

Also Tuesday, WHO's Chaib promised a thorough public audit of the agency's early missteps in responding to the Ebola crisis. But at the moment, "our focus is on the response."

AP

(AP) — An American photojournalist who contracted Ebola while working in Liberia is expected to arrive Monday in Nebraska where he will be treated for the virus that has ravaged West Africa.

Ashoka Mukpo, 33, will be the second Ebola patient to be treated at the Nebraska Medical Center's specialized isolation unit. Mukpo was working in Liberia as a freelance cameraman for NBC News when he became ill last week.

NBC reported Sunday evening that Mukpo had started his journey to the U.S. for treatment and that he would arrive Monday morning. Mukpo's family said Friday he would be treated in Omaha. Hospital officials said they expected an Ebola patient to arrive Monday, but declined to provide a name.

Mukpo is the fifth American to return to the United States for treatment since the start of the latest Ebola outbreak, which the World Health Organization estimates has killed more than 3,400 people.

The hospital's biocontainment unit was created in 2005 specifically to handle this kind of illness, said Dr. Phil Smith, who oversees the unit.

"We are ready, willing and able to care for this patient," Smith said. "We consider it our duty to give these American citizens the best possible care we can."

Mukpo's father, Dr. Mitchell Levy, told NBC Sunday that his son was "counting the minutes" until he could leave Liberia but that he was not feeling that ill Sunday. Levy said the family was travelling from Rhode Island to Nebraska.

Doctors at the isolation unit — the largest of four nationwide — will evaluate Mukpo before determining how to treat him. They said they will apply the lessons learned while treating American aid worker Rick Sacra in September. Sacra was successfully treated in the Nebraska unit and was allowed to return to his home in Massachusetts after three weeks, on Sept. 25.

Sacra received an experimental Tekmira Pharmaceuticals drug called TKM-Ebola, as well as two blood transfusions from another American aid worker who recovered from Ebola at an Atlanta hospital. The transfusions are believed to help a patient fight off the virus because the survivor's blood carries antibodies for the disease. Sacra also received supportive care, including IV fluids and aggressive electrolyte management.

In Dallas, another man who recently traveled to the U.S. from Liberia was listed in critical condition Sunday. Thomas Eric Duncan has been hospitalized at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital since Sept. 28. Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he was aware that Duncan's health had "taken a turn for the worse," but he declined to describe Duncan's condition further.

The virus that causes Ebola is not airborne and can only be spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids — blood, sweat, vomit, feces, urine, saliva or semen — of an infected person who is showing symptoms.

Duncan arrived in Dallas on Sept. 20 and fell ill a few days later. Officials say 10 people definitely had close contact with Duncan and a further 38 may have been around him when he was showing symptoms of the disease.

Before he was admitted to the hospital, Duncan stayed with Louise Troh, her 13-year-old son and two nephews in their northeast Dallas apartment. The family has been kept in isolation in an undisclosed location since Friday and a hazardous materials crew has twice decontaminated their home. No one in the family has developed Ebola symptoms.

On Sunday, Troh told The Associated Press that she was afraid the crew might damage or destroy some irreplaceable keepsakes that she was forced to leave at the apartment, including photographs and recordings of her daughter, a singer, who died in childbirth.

"If they throw out her picture, her recordings, I'll be hurt. Her live CD's in there. That's all I have to show her children in the future. I don't want to miss it," she said in a phone interview.

(Reuters) - Algerian militants have beheaded French tourist Herve Gourdel, who was kidnapped by gunmen on Sunday in what the group said was a response to France's action against Islamic State militants in Iraq.

In a video released by his captors, Gourdel, a 55-year-old from Nice, is seen kneeling with his arms tied behind his back before four masked militants who read out a statement in Arabic criticising France's intervention.

They then pushed him on his side and held him down. The video does not show the beheading, but a militant later holds the head up to the camera.

"This is why the Caliphate Soldiers in Algeria have decided to punish France, by executing this man, and to defend our beloved Islamic State," one of the militants says in the statement he read out.

France's President Francois Hollande confirmed the death of Gourdel, and vowed that French military operations against Islamic State would continue.

"Our compatriot has been killed cruelly and in a cowardly way by a terrorist group. Herve Gourdel was assassinated because he was French," Hollande, visibly shaken by the events, said at the United Nations. "My determination is total, and this aggression only strengthens it. France will continue to fight terrorists everywhere. The operations against Islamic State will continue."

The Caliphate Soldiers, a splinter group linked to Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, had on Monday published a video claiming responsibility for the abduction and showed the man identifying himself as Gourdel.

The kidnapping had come after Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani urged the group's followers to attack citizens of the United States, France and other countries that joined the coalition to destroy the radical group.

Just before the militants gave their statement in the video, the Frenchman told his family that he loved them.

There was no immediate comment from Gourdel's relatives, but a friend, Eric Grinda, told France's i-Tele television: "They want to fan the flames of hatred and to make us want to respond. They only are able to do one thing, assassinate a man on his knees with his hands tied ... My sadness is immense."

France launched its first air strikes targeting Islamic State targets in Iraq on Friday. It has said all must be done to rid the region of the group.

France raised the threat level at 30 of its embassies across the Middle East and Africa on Monday.

DEEPENING ISLAMIST RIVALRIES

Western diplomats and intelligence sources say they believe there are fewer than 10 Western hostages still held by Islamic State. The group has recently beheaded two Americans, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and one Briton, David Haines, and threatened to kill another Briton, Alan Henning.

The Frenchman's kidnapping was one of the first abductions of a foreigner by militants in Algeria since the North African country ended its decade-long war with Islamist fighters in the 1990s.

There have, however, been many attacks in the Maghreb region carried out by armed Islamists. In January 2013, al Qaeda-linked militants took more than 800 people hostage at a gas facility near In Amenas, Algeria. Algerian special forces raided the site, but 40 workers were killed, all but one of them foreigners, along with 29 militants.

Gourdel, a French nature guide and photographer, was taken hostage when militants stopped his vehicle in the remote mountains east of Algiers where he planned a hiking trip, according to Algeria's interior ministry.

Algerian troops had launched a search for Gourdel in the mountains in an area known as the "Triangle of Death" during the bloody days of Algeria's 1990s war with Islamists. Though attacks from Islamists are rarer, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other groups are still active. The Caliphate Soldiers group earlier this month announced it had broken with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, known as AQIM, to back Islamic State, in another illustration of deepening rivalries between Islamic State and al Qaeda's core leadership. AQIM central region commander Khaled Abu Suleimane, who claimed leadership of the Caliphate Soldiers, is a hardliner who has consistently refused peace agreements with the government and traces his militant roots back to the 1990s war.

In that war, 200,000 were killed, as militants fought a bloody campaign - cutting throats, massacring villages and kidnapping civilians - to overthrow the government and install an Islamic state in Algeria.