Typhoon wrote:LIberia is declared Ebola free
The World Health Organization announces the end of Ebola in Liberia, but the epidemic continues in nearby Sierra Leone and Guinea.
While it is not over that is certainly good news. But has the lesson been learned? It was only controlled by those in the countries effected not by the rest of the world. It was controlled only because the local people changed their every day behavior because they did not want to die.
According to the Doctors without borders representative to Guinea the WHO was worthless.
nW5pFYvot9k
http://apps.frontline.org/ebola-alarm/
The WHO considered declaring an international health emergency, but officials were concerned about causing panic.
On June 21, MSF warned it had reached the limits of what its teams could do and said that controlling the Ebola epidemic would require "a massive deployment of resources by governments in West Africa and aid organizations."
The epidemic is out of control... With the appearance of new sites in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, there is a real risk of it spreading to other areas... We have reached our limits."
– Dr. Bart Janssens, director of operations, Doctors Without Borders, June 21, 2014
The WHO's excuse was they didn't want to cause a panic
YdC1DZsZohE
"I’ve been telling the world for the last few months that it’s an unprecedented out of control Ebola epidemic... People don’t listen to me but you, as the WHO, you need to step up to the plate and declare it because you have the authority and you have the legitimacy."
– Joanne Liu, president, Doctors Without Borders
On Aug. 8., the WHO declared an international emergency, putting a high-level team in Geneva in charge of the response.
By this point, Ebola had reached West Point, a densely packed slum in Liberia’s capital. Officials decided to isolate sick and suspected patients in a holding center, but four days after it opened, the facility was overrun. Rumors spread that Ebola was a hoax. Looters grabbed contaminated mattresses and sick patients disappeared back into the community.
On Aug. 19, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf imposed a quarantine on West Point. It backfired, igniting violent protests. The infected had nowhere to go but the streets. The virus spread more quickly.
"This is the largest, most severe, most complex outbreak in the nearly four-decade history of the disease... I am declaring the current outbreak of the Ebola virus disease a public health emergency of international concern..."
– Dr. Margaret Chan, director general, WHO, Aug. 8, 2014
Lacking enough medics, authority and budget to deal with the outbreak, the WHO asked wealthy countries for assistance. MSF, dealing with an exponentially rising number of cases across West Africa, made a direct plea to the U.S. for soldiers to help isolate and treat the sick.
Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, visited West Africa in late August. Frieden said he told President Barack Obama,
“This isn’t about the response in the next three months, it’s about the response in the next three days that matters.”
Epilogue
Nearly a year and a half after the Ebola outbreak began, the disease has reached nine nations in total, but the number of infections is slowly winding down thanks to an influx of aid, as well as efforts by the citizens of West Africa to change how they lived their lives, nursed their sick and buried their dead. Liberia has not reported any confirmed cases of the disease in five weeks. Guinea and Sierra Leone continue to report new cases of Ebola, but they are far below the levels seen during the height of the crisis.
The WHO announced in April 2015 that the Ebola outbreak continues to be a public health emergency of international concern. On April 16, the WHO released a statement acknowledging that the Ebola outbreak “served as a reminder that the world, including WHO, is ill-prepared for a large and sustained disease outbreak.”
"There are going to be more of these, no matter what we think. More and more new diseases are emerging. We’ve seen pandemic flu. We’ve seen SARS. We’ve seen Ebola like this. And we are not prepared," WHO’s Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward warned. "Ebola was not an exception, Ebola is a precedent."
MORE
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... -epidemic/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... ak-sooner/
Could there have been a chance to stop the disease before it claimed more than 10,000 lives?
LKLJPlCPSpQ
What it is like in an Ebola hospital
LFC211NUajg