WEEKLY PROGRAM - THE EBOLA OUTBREAK IN AFRICA
Dr Bruce Aylward, Special Representative of the Director-General for the Ebola Response and Assistant Director-General of WHO, reminds us in this interview about the Ebola crisis situation in West Africa in late 2014; and how the international community has faced this huge public health challenge since then. His interview ends with a series of key lessons learned that must be applied next time the world faces a pathogen like Ebola.
Liberia was declared free of Ebola by world health experts on Thursday (JANUARY 14, 2016)signaling an end to an epidemic that has killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa.
UPDATE 10:00 a.m. EST Friday (JANUARY 15, 2016): A dead woman’s body tested positive for Ebola in Sierra Leone just hours after the World Health Organization declared the region Ebola-free on Thursday, underscoring the need for vigilance in the fight against the deadly epidemic.
Mariatu Jalloh, a 22-year-old student --who died on Jan. 12 --began showing symptoms at the start of the year and may have been exposed to at least 27 more people, Reuters reports. She went to receive treatment on Jan. 8 at a local hospital, where she was treated as an outpatient then sent home. She also traveled around Sierra Leone in December, even making a stop in a town close to the Guinean border. Sierra Leone was declared Ebola-free on Nov. 7.
Thursday, however, marked a new and momentous threshold – 42 days, or twice the disease’s incubation period, without an active case anywhere. That was enough for the global health community to make a long-awaited declaration: Two years, ten countries, and 11,000 deaths later, the world’s worst Ebola outbreak was officially over.
“We don’t want to say ‘Ebola is gone,’” says Dr. Alex Gasasira, director for the World Health Organization office in Liberia, the last country to have an active Ebola case. “Rather, we are declaring that this particular epidemic appears to be over. But that doesn’t mean it won’t come back, so we must continue to be prepared and to be vigilant.”
Now, the region faces its greatest public health challenge: to transform the lessons of the epidemic's darkest days into long-term public health gains. This means addressing the cracks in public infrastructure, local governance, and international public health response- and making to keep those systems from buckling again.
One crucial lesson that applies to all infectious diseases is a simple one, says Axelle Ronsse, an Ebola emergency response coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (MSF): Get there faster.
The sluggish response by both local governments and the international community to the first reports of confirmed Ebola cases in early 2014 allowed the disease to slip unnoticed over the border from rural Guinea into neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone, and from there on to overcrowded cities.
“One key lesson … is that we are dependent on each other and disease has no borders,” says Dr. Foday Dafae, director of disease prevention and control in the Sierra Leonean Ministry of Health. “Equally so we need to train our work force to be prepared at all times to be able to respond as soon as there is an outbreak.”