West Africa: Ebola Response of MSF and Boiling Frog WHO Under Scrutiny Dakar — A decade ago, scientists would have laughed at the idea of Ebola as a public health emergency of international concern. Today, they are shocked at the glaring gaps the deadly virus has exposed in the global response to the current outbreak. Ebola, a rare tropical disease, has killed almost as many people in 6 months as in the previous 40 years. Experimental vaccines and treatments are available, but months away from use by the estimated 30,000 people who could have benefited from them, according to Nature magazine. I would have laughed if you had said Ebola would be a global public health emergency, said David Heymann, who was working with the CDC team when the deadly virus was first recorded close to the River Ebola in Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire. Ebola outbreaks can be stopped with a robust response. Since 1976, 25 Ebola outbreaks have occurred throughout Africa. Most of them were contained within the locality of patient zero - the first person to be infected when the virus jumped to humans from animals, as it does periodically. That changed in March when the deadly Zaire strain was confirmed in Gueckedou, a small town in southern Guinea. Since then, it has killed over 1,350 people across West Africa, spanning hundreds of kilometres from Guinea to Nigeria.allafrica/stories/201408221465.html?aa_source=mf-hdlns
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 20:00:21 +0000
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