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MEDICAL: DISEASES: EBOLA VIRUS :
AFRICA:
How the World Let Ebola Spread
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How the World Let Ebola Spread
Published on NewsOK
Modified: October 4, 2014 at 7:43 pm
Published: October 4, 2014
The Washington Post
http://newsok.com/how-the-world-let-ebola-spread/article/feed/743729
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Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), knew it was no simple matter to properly carry away a
body loaded with Ebola virus. It takes four people wearing protective
suits, one at each corner of a body bag. On that grim day near the end of
August, in a makeshift Ebola ward in Monrovia, Liberia, burial teams
already had lugged 60 victims to a truck for the trip to the crematorium.
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Frieden had seen plenty of death over the years, but this was far worse
than he expected, a plague on a medieval scale. "A scene out of Dante," he
called it.
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Shaken, he flew back to the United States on Aug. 31 and immediately
briefed President Barack Obama by phone. The window to act was closing, he
told the president in the 15-minute call.
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That conversation, nearly six months after the World Health Organization
(WHO) learned of an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, was part of a mounting
realization among world leaders that the battle against the virus was
being lost. As of early September, with more than 1,800 confirmed Ebola
deaths in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, there was still no coordinated
global response. Alarmed U.S. officials realized they would need to call
in the military.
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Obama eventually ordered 3,000 military personnel to West Africa; about
200 had arrived by the beginning of this month. They will be joined by
health workers from such countries as Britain, China and Cuba. Canada and
Japan are sending protective gear and mobile laboratories. Nonprofit
organizations such as the Gates Foundation also are contributing. But it's
not at all clear that this belated muscular response will be enough to
quell the epidemic before it takes tens of thousands of lives.
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This is an open-ended crisis involving a microscopic threat on the move.
This past week came the unsettling news that the Ebola epidemic has now
reached across the Atlantic Ocean to a hospital in Texas, where a Liberian
man has tested positive for the virus.
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So how did the situation get so horribly out of control?
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The virus easily outran the plodding response. The WHO, an arm of the
United Nations, is responsible for coordinating international action in a
crisis like this, but it has suffered budget cuts, has lost many of its
brightest minds and was slow to sound a global alarm on Ebola. Not until
Aug. 8, 4 1/2 months into the epidemic, did the organization declare a
global emergency. Its Africa office, which oversees the region, initially
did not welcome a robust role by the CDC in the response to the outbreak.
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Previous Ebola outbreaks had been quickly throttled, but that experience
proved misleading and officials did not grasp the potential scale of the
disaster. Their imaginations were unequal to the virulence of the
pathogen.
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"In retrospect, we could have responded faster. Some of the criticism is
appropriate," acknowledged Richard Brennan, director of the WHO's
Department of Emergency Risk Management and Humanitarian Response. But he
added, "While some of the criticism we accept, I think we also have to get
things in perspective that this outbreak has a dynamic that's unlike
everything we've ever seen before and, I think, has caught everyone
unawares."
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The epidemic has exposed a disconnect between the aspirations of global
health officials and the reality of infectious disease control. Officials
hold faraway strategy sessions about fighting emerging diseases and
bioterrorism even as front-line doctors and nurses don't have enough latex
gloves, protective gowns, rehydrating fluid or workers to carry bodies to
the morgue.
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"We cannot wait for those high-level meetings to convene and discuss over
cocktails and petits fours what they're going to do," exclaimed Joanne
Liu, international head of Doctors Without Borders, when she heard about
another U.N. initiative. Her group was among the first to respond to the
viral conflagration, and it kept its staff in West Africa throughout the
crisis.
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West Africa was ill-equipped for an Ebola disaster, because civil war and
chronic poverty had undermined local health systems and there were few
doctors and nurses. Health workers in the region had never experienced an
Ebola outbreak and didn't know what they were seeing in those first
critical months. In the spring the outbreak seemed to fade, making
officials overconfident. And then the virus made the leap from rural
villages to crowded cities.
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Local customs in handling the dead led to further infections. Some West
Africans believe that the day you die is one of the most important days of
your life. The final farewell can be a hands-on, affectionate ritual in
which the body is washed and dressed, and in some villages carried through
the community, where friends and relatives will share a favorite beverage
by putting the cup to the lips of the deceased before taking a drink.
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The complete article may be read at the URL above.
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