One year after the Ebola epidemic

A year ago, Dr. Stephane Hugonnet was dispatched to Guinea to investigate a series of unexplained deaths, he had little idea that he'd be contending with an outbreak that would quickly spread from a small southern rainforest village, across borders, and around the world.
The Ebola outbreak, ravaging primarily Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, is a year old today. According to one official count, it's infected 24,000 people and killed 10,000.It's managed to do so because of an institutional failure on several levels: weak public health systems locally and a painfully slow response globally.

The best news is that the epidemic is coming under control. In the week to March 8, 116 new cases were reported from Sierra Leone and Guinea, compared to a thousand or more per week at the height of the outbreak. Liberia reported no new confirmed cases for the second consecutive week. This reduction is mainly thanks to the implementation of basic hygiene and public-health procedures: the rehydration of patients; the separation of the healthy from the sick, the dying and the dead; the use of diluted bleach for washing; and a better understanding of cultural practices so that families and communities can be protected from the risk of, for example, preparing dead bodies for funerals when they are still highly infectious.

Yet applying higher-tech solutions, such as a vaccine, has been much slower going. Several Ebola vaccines were first conceived more than a decade ago but then shelved. Much more could and should have been done in advance of this outbreak, measures that would have enabled trials to begin as soon as the alarm was raised. Critical safety and dosing studies could have been carried out years ago rather than waiting until an outbreak occurred.

One year on, this outbreak may now appear to be subsiding. But there will be other epidemics, including Ebola itself. We can’t afford not to learn the lessons of this one.