Citing Security Threat, Obama Expands U.S. Role Fighting Ebola

  President Barack Obama on Tuesday called West Africa’s deadly Ebola outbreak a looming threat to global security and announced a major expansion of the U.S. role in trying to halt its spread, including deployment of 3,000 troops to the region.
“The reality is that this epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better,” Obama said at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Atlanta headquarters.
“But right now, the world still has an opportunity to save countless lives. Right now, the world has the responsibility to act, to step up and to do more. The United States of America intends to do more,” Obama added.
The U.S. plan, a dramatic expansion of Washington’s initial response last week, won praise from the U.N. World Health Organization, aid workers and officials in West Africa. But health experts said it was still not enough to contain the epidemic, which is quickly growing and has caused local healthcare systems to buckle under the strain of fighting it.
U.S. officials said the focus of the military deployment would be Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves that is the hardest hit of the countries affected by the crisis.
Obama’s plan calls for sending 3,000 troops, including engineers and medical personnel; establishing a regional command and control center in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia; building 17 treatment centers with 100 beds each; training thousands of healthcare workers – up to 500 per week for six months or longer; and establishing a military control center for coordinating the relief effort.

“We have to act fast. We can’t dawdle on this one,” Obama said

The White House said the troops will not be responsible for direct patient care. Obama also said the “chances of an Ebola outbreak here in the United States are extremely low.”
The worst Ebola outbreak since the disease was identified in 1976 has already killed nearly 2,500 people and is threatening to spread elsewhere in Africa.
 

GLOBAL SECURITY

Obama said that if the outbreak is not stopped now, hundreds of thousands of people may become infected, “with profound political and economic and security implications for all of us.”
“This is an epidemic that is not just a threat to regional security. It’s a potential threat to global security, if these countries break down, if their economies break down, if people panic. That has profound effects on all of us, even if we are not directly contracting the disease,” Obama added.
The WHO praised the U.S. plan for providing support to the United Nations and other international partners to help authorities in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal contain the outbreak.
“This massive ramp-up of support from the United States is precisely the kind of transformational change we need to get a grip on the outbreak and begin to turn it around,” Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO’s director-general, said in a statement.
Earlier, a senior WHO official said the Ebola outbreak requires a much faster response to limit its spread to tens of thousands of cases.
“We don’t know where the numbers are going on this,” WHO Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward told a news conference in Geneva, calling the crisis “unparalleled in modern times.”
Obama’s announcement marks his second within a week of a new mission for the U.S. military, following last week’s speech outlining a broad escalation of the campaign against the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria.

‘WELCOME NEWS’

Liberians hailed the word that U.S. troops were coming, recalling a military operation in 2003 that helped stabilize the country during a civil war.
“This is welcome news. This is what we expected from the U.S. a long time ago,” Anthony Mulbah, a student at the University of Monrovia, said in the dilapidated oceanfront capital. “The U.S. remains a strong partner to Liberia.”
In Liberia, a shortage of space in clinics for isolating victims means patients are being turned away, then infecting others.
The initial U.S. response last week had focused on providing funding and supplies, drawing criticism from aid workers for not deploying manpower as in other disasters like earthquakes.
Ebola spreads rapidly, causes fever and uncontrolled bleeding. The latest outbreak has killed more than half its victims. Its impact has been greatest in Liberia and neighboring Guinea and Sierra Leone.
The virus has so far killed 2,461 people, half of the 4,985 people infected, and the death toll has doubled in the past month, WHO’s Aylward said.
The outbreak was first confirmed in the remote forests of southeastern Guinea in March, then spread across Sierra Leone and Liberia. A handful of Ebola deaths have been recorded in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.
The disease has crippled weak health systems, infecting hundreds of local staff in a region chronically short of doctors. The WHO has said that 500 to 600 more foreign experts and at least 10,000 more local health workers are needed.
“It is not enough to provide protective clothing when you don’t have the people who will wear them,” Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama said during a visit to Sierra Leone.
The U.S. deployment revives memories of Liberia’s war years, when Monrovians piled bodies of the dead at the U.S. embassy to persuade Washington to send troops. In 2003, a U.S. mission helped African forces stabilize Liberia after 14 years of war, in which some 250,000 people are thought to have died.
Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who wrote to Obama last week to plead for direct U.S. intervention, was due to address her country on Wednesday.
The U.S. intervention comes as the pace of cash and emergency supplies dispatched to the region accelerates.
Washington has sent about 100 health officials and committed some $175 million in aid so far. Other nations, including Cuba, China, France and Britain; have pledged medical workers, health centers and other forms of support.
Critics, including regional leaders, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Peter Piot, one of the scientists who discovered Ebola in 1976; have said international efforts have so far fallen woefully short.
“It is now up to other governments to equally scale up their support in Sierra Leone and Guinea,” Piot, now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told Reuters.
Many neighboring African countries have closed their borders and canceled flights to affected countries, making the humanitarian response more difficult.
A draft U.N. Security Council resolution on Ebola, obtained by Reuters, calls on U.N. member states, particularly in the region, to lift general travel and border restrictions.” The resolution could win approval later this week.
In a speech to the United Nations, the president of medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which has some 2,000 staff members fighting the disease in the region, said other countries need to follow the U.S. lead.

Citing Security Threat, Obama Expands U.S. Role Fighting Ebola

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from The better Thingshttp://thebetter-things.blogspot.com/2014/09/citing-security-threat-obama-expands-us.html

Low-carb diet beats VS low-fat for weight loss and heart Health

    Good news for people who like oil more than bread: People on a low-carbohydrate diet lowered certain risk factors for cardiovascular disease and lost nearly three times as much weight as those on a low-fat diet, a new study found.

“This isn’t a license to hit the butter and meat fats,” cautioned Dr. Lydia Bazzano, a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and one of the study’s lead authors. “But even very high-fat diets can be healthy.”
bit more on the low-carb diet than it did on the low-fat diet,” Bazzano said.
At the end of the study period, participants in the low-carb group had lost nearly 12 pounds on average. Those in the low-fat group had lost 4 pounds on average. 
The people in the low-carb group were told to have less than 40 grams of digestible carbohydrate per day, and those in the low-fat group were told to get less than 30% of their daily calories from fat (less than 7% from saturated fat) and 55% from carbohydrate.
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Karen Kaplan
Neither group got a limit for total caloric intake, and participants were told to keep getting as much or as little physical activity as was normal for them.

All participants got counseling sessions that Bazzano said covered topics such as planning meals, portion size, what to do at restaurants and how to read nutrition labels. It’s unclear whether people who have similar diets but don’t get such counseling would have similar results, the study noted.
cComments
    The study is totally invalid. Scientific method is completely ignored. There was no control of, nor records of what the subjects actually consumed. They were given guidelines and left to their own devices. Physical activity was not accounted for. Caloric intake was not accounted for. There is…
 Bazzano said participants were also educated about different kinds of fats. Monounsaturated fats (such as canola and olive oils) and polyunsaturated fats (found in foods such as nuts and fish) were “recommended,” she said. Saturated fats — generally speaking, those that are solid at room temperature — were “not recommended.”

The study isn’t the last word on what kind of diet is best. An analysis published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. looking at 48 studies involving overweight or obese participants found significant weight loss with any low-carbohydrate or low-fat diet.

Low-carb diet beats VS low-fat for weight loss and heart Health

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from The better Thingshttp://thebetter-things.blogspot.com/2014/09/low-carb-diet-beats-vs-low-fat-for.html

List of Healthy Foods to Lose Weight

 Have no text to check? haven’t any text to check? Click “Select Samples”.When you’re making an attempt to slenderize the primary step is most frequently fixing your diet however it are often laborious to grasp what foods can assist you shed the pounds and lose those further inches, particularly to Lose Weight if you’re wont to high calorie nutriment like I wont to be.
therewith in mind, that’s why I’ve fondly researched to Lose Weight and created this list of fifty healthy foods which will assist you slenderize and, a lot of healthy significantly, keep it off! These foods area unit nice for preventing water retention, rushing up your healthy metabolism and they’ll keep you feeling fuller for extended and facilitate oppose those frightful cravings! They’re filled with healthy nutrients, vitamins and attractive goodness to Lose Weight, that means they’e smart for you all spherical. What a lot of might you want? get pleasure from, ladies, and don’t sniff at any of them if you haven’t tried them, you’ll end up pleasantly stunned, I actually was

1. Beans

Beans area unit an incredible supply of fibre and macromolecule similarly as varied different nutrients that area to Lose Weight unit essential to a diet. similarly as this, they’re extremely low in calories and an excellent supply of slow unleash energy that keeps your metabolism up all day long.
You get such a large amount of differing kinds of beans too and every one of them area unit smart for you to Lose Weight. excretory organ beans to Lose Weight, black beans, chick peas, no matter you like! whereas they will not be a meal on their healthy own, strive combining them into a dish, adding some to your main meal, creating a stew of them or throwing them in a very wrap or dish – you’ll be as artistic as you like!

2. Green Tea

Green tea is astounding once it involves losing weight, stopping bloating and ridding your body of harmful toxins.
It’s documented for serving to the body to flush out excess fluids and rushing up the metabolism, each of that area unit nice for serving to you to lose those further pounds.
Personally, I’m not a friend of healthy tea leaf however luck on behalf of me it comes in innumerable variations. you’ll catch on with a touch of lemon, peppermint, herbaceous plant – the food market shelves area unit lined with varied sorts to suit everyones’ tastes. For further goodness to Lose Weight, attempt to get your tea leaf organic too.

3.Tomatoes

Tomatoes area unit an incredible fat-fighting food to Lose Weight.
They scale back water retention and inflammation similarly as reversing leptin resistance, one thing that is important for serving to to manage our appetency and healthy metabolism, particularly if we would like to to Lose Weight those further pounds.
 Even higher, you’ll cook them in unnumerable ways that, add them to stews, pasta, sandwiches, you name it! just about any meal are often created healthier with simply alittle portion of tomatoes.
they are available to Lose Weight altogether shapes and sizes too that means they vary in flavour therefore they’re not forever a similar previous style to Lose Weight.
In person I like cherry tomatoes however there’s conjointly beef tomatoes, baby tomatoes, home fully grown healthy tomatoes similarly as several more! Why not stick a pot to Lose Weight on your sill and you get get joy out of growing them similarly as feeding them?

4. Oranges

Oranges area unit if truth be told one among the healthiest foods you’ll eat.
similarly as being low in calories to Lose Weight. the have fully no fat in them to Lose Weight.
That’s right, NO fat – zero, zilch! and, per healthy serving, they supply a hundred and sixtieth of your daily serving of water-soluble vitamin. Oh, and did I mention to Lose Weight they’re stuffed with potassium? I’ll admit I didn’t understand all this till I did my analysis for putting this on ink however currently I do I’ll be filling my fruit bowl with them later today to Lose Weight! positive, they’re teasing to Lose Weight peel however suddenly that tiny inconvenience appears trivial after you investigate the a lot of larger (and a lot of healthier!)

List of Healthy Foods to Lose Weight

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from The better Thingshttp://thebetter-things.blogspot.com/2014/05/list-of-healthy-foods-to-lose-weight.html