Hasta La Gadget!

LONDON (AP) — As health officials struggle to contain the world’s biggest-ever Ebola outbreak, their efforts are being complicated by another problem: bad data.

Having accurate numbers about an outbreak is essential not only to provide a realistic picture of the epidemic, but to determine effective control strategies. Dr. Bruce Aylward, who is leading the World Health Organization’s Ebola response, said it’s crucial to track every single Ebola patient in West Africa to stop the outbreak and that serious gaps remain in their data. “As we move into the stage of hunting down the virus instead of just slowing the exponential growth, having good data is going to be at the heart of this,” Aylward said. “We are not there yet and this is something we definitely need to fix.”

“Decisions about prevention and treatment should be data-driven, but we really don’t have the data,” agreed Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.

A week ago, the World Health Organization insisted at a media briefing it had mostly met targets to isolate 70 percent of Ebola patients and bury 70 percent of victims safely in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. But two days later, WHO backtracked and said that data inconsistencies meant they really didn’t know how many patients were being isolated. Then the U.N. health agency also conceded that many of the safe burials were of people not actually killed by Ebola.

Aylward said not knowing exactly how many Ebola patients there are in hotspots like western Sierra Leone means health officials might miss potential contacts who could unknowingly cause a surge of cases. Compared to other epidemics like malaria, which is more seasonal and can fade away without huge control efforts, ending the Ebola outbreak will require extraordinary attention to detail.

“This outbreak started with one case and it will end with one case,” Aylward said. “If we can’t get 100 percent of the contacts of cases, we will not be on track to shut it down. Unfortunately at the moment, the data right now is not enough for us to get to zero.”

In West Africa, where health systems were already broken before Ebola struck, collecting data amid a raging outbreak has been challenging.

“Suddenly you have all these different sources of data that have to be compiled” from different aid agencies, said Ray Ransom, a data expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The ability to actually collect information is a different challenge than responding to the outbreak, and the energy has been focused on the response.”

He said local officials are good at tracking known or suspected Ebola cases and their contacts but not as reliable relaying that information to national authorities.

The software built to track Ebola outbreaks was initially designed by the CDC to have one person entering data into a computer. That “was perfectly fine since the dawn of time up until” the outbreak exploded this summer, said Armand Sprecher, a public health specialist with Doctors Without Borders.

The CDC has redesigned the software so now multiple people can enter data, although that created new problems like possible duplication, Sprecher said.

When the epidemic starts to taper off, health officials should have more time to find every Ebola case and their contacts. But they may find they have to re-establish trust with the community to do that.

“If people were calling in cases for months and no one was coming … and then suddenly that’s no longer a bottleneck, do people suddenly realize that and say, aha, if I call in today, it’ll work this time?” asked Sprecher. “If you’ve lost the community, you don’t get anywhere.”

___

Sarah DiLorenzo reported from Dakar, Senegal.

Jingle all the way!

Boob-twerking Sara X, who busted onto the Internet in October with her eye-popping Mozart performance, and later returned to raise awareness (and money) for breast cancer, is back.

In her latest video, the pectoral prima donna appears in a Santa Claus hat and jingles her bells to the classic holiday tune. Here are some outtakes from the shoot.

Sara released the video on her YouTube channel Monday, where it’s already run up more than 1 million views.

The gloriously tattooed former dancer does her trick by flexing her pectoral muscles, which causes her breast implants to bounce.

She was compelled to explain how she does it in October after people accused her of faking the routine.

“While my boobs are very fake, the video is very real… I am flexing my pectoral muscles and it’s moving my implants,” Sara said in a Facebook post.

(h/t Jezebel)

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A few months ago I wrote about young people setting up small businesses in Bangladesh, and how we are helping them. We have learned a lot so far and we have planted many exciting seeds. Today, I would like to tell you more about the same efforts of planting seeds in Albania, where we are helping entrepreneurs develop their social businesses.

Albania is a small country on the Mediterranean Sea, across from Italy and north of Greece. After a long period of isolation and Communist regime, it has opened up to new ideas and it hopes to soon become part of the European Union. But there are still plenty of problems, including rural poverty, youth unemployment and old-age isolation. For example, a quarter of young people are unemployed — and since more than a third of the population is under 25, that’s a big problem. Also, as young people are forced to leave home (and in many cases, to go abroad) to find work, the countryside is left without young, inspired minds that could help drive change. Older people are being left stranded, with no one to care for them.

Photo: The beginning of a journey: The next cycle of the Yunus Social Business Accelerator program in Albania was kicked off during the Social Business Week Albania

Traditional businesses in Albania do not address these issues and people as they are not profitable enough or just too difficult to tackle. But the government and NGOs can’t solve all these problems either. Their financial means are very limited and the great projects they are running very much depend on donations, which are decreasing as international donors pull out. That’s why a new generation of entrepreneurs is turning towards the idea of social business. Social businesses are companies created with the sole purpose of solving a social problem. They do that in a business way and once the business is making a profit, it can continue to create social impact. All profits that it generates are reinvested into the same or other social businesses. In the past I have created plenty of these in Bangladesh, and the idea has been catching on in many other countries — including now in Albania.

Two years ago I visited Albania for the first time, and I met many of the entrepreneurs who were planting the seeds of new social businesses. There was a café providing employment to disabled people (my colleague from Yunus Social Business — Global Initiatives, Saskia, wrote about it on the Huffington Post), an old people’s home (which is a new concept in Albania), a company packaging and marketing home-made delicacies from rural areas, and an organic farm, amongst others. Our team helped them on the ground to develop their business models, and then financed them with loans and equity, not donations, because these should be businesses, not charities.

But did it work? That’s what I wanted to find out. So earlier this month I returned to Albania, to see if and how these seeds had sprouted. I also wanted to give encouragement and advice to the next batch of social business entrepreneurs that my team is helping.

Photo: The seeds that have been planted: Visiting a social business that uses scrap wood to manufacture furniture and employs people from marginalized groups

Well, the good news is that most of the social businesses have made it through the past two years, and are working their way towards success. As many of you may already be suspecting, it hasn’t been easy for any of them — I don’t think entrepreneurship ever is! — and we have also lost a few along the way. But the old people’s home has been built and opened; its serving its clients and their families well. When I visited, I talked to families that were in tears out of thankfulness for the great offers that the home provides. Even better, it will be earning more money than it spends in the next few months and can reinvest the profits to further increase day care and home care services. A new café for disabled integration is loved by its regulars. It faced a few challenges in the first months and the team in Albania helped the entrepreneurs to bring it back on track. Now, it is doing well and on track to become break-even as well. The delicacies company is scaling up from pilot phase to full operation. We did not manage to find a business model for the organic farm, unfortunately, and did not proceed with financing. The team did, however, find and finance another entrepreneur who now grows and harvests organic medicinal and aromatic herbs and already employs 50 people after only few months of operations.

What really struck me during this second visit to Albania was how many more people now know about social business and want to get involved. Two years ago, it was a real struggle to find enough good entrepreneurs to join our program. Last year, we had 100 applicants. This time around, we have received more than 250 applications. I’m excited about ideas for community-based rural tourism, mobile services for smallholder farmers, and turning waste materials into furniture and jewelry, amongst others. Institutions and local leaders also have a much better understanding of social business and are now inspired by the great work on the ground. The media attention has definitely helped as well — one TV channel even did a TV competition with us for social business entrepreneurs (the disabled-integration café was the winner) and there have been five TV appearances by social businesses this year alone.

Fundamentally, I think it’s because people are seeing these new social businesses starting to make real differences in their communities. It’s very early still, and of course all of these projects are still very small. But people are getting inspired and we have heard about 10 more social businesses that have been started this year with or even without our help — which is great!

Now, Yunus Social Business Albania is excited to turn the small seeds of social businesses into large trees — it is just a question of support and patience. I’m already looking forward to seeing the growth the next time I visit Albania. Meanwhile, other countries in the region want to join in too. Already two social entrepreneurs from Kosovo are joining their Albanian peers for the next entrepreneurship program. So the seeds are spreading and so is the excitement of using creativity and business to address the greatest challenges we face.

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