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Ebola was here
LAurie Garrett, Foreign Policy:...snip...
"You had bodies lying in the streets exposed to dogs, in the absence of war, of natural disaster -- that has never happened in modern times, not due to disease," Swedish infectious disease expert Hans Rosling told me. In early July, Rosling wrote and advised the World Health Organization (WHO) that this Ebola epidemic was easily controllable, and that dedicating excessive resources to it would result in a net increase in deaths due to other ailments such as malaria, chronic diseases, and auto accidents. "You must blame me -- I missed it," Rosling told me, clearly bearing a weight of guilt. When he realized his mistake in September, Rosling took a leave from his professorial job at Uppsala University in Sweden and volunteered to work inside Liberia's Ministry of Health, where he has toiled since, crunching case and death toll numbers. Today Rosling accepts the U.S. CDC's dire predictions -- worst-case scenarios that assume no international response was mustered.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention then predicted that unless the world mobilized on a scale unprecedented in the history of disease outbreaks, the countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone could by Feb. 1, 2015 have a combined 1.4 million cases, including 980,000 deaths.
Just six weeks later, the picture is so markedly different that some Liberians talk about the epidemic using the past tense. And that worries Gasasira, the acting director of the WHO in Liberia, deeply.
"Over the last six weeks efforts by everybody have resulted in a scaled-up response. So now we are slightly ahead of the virus," Gasasira told me in his no-frills concrete WHO office. "But we are nowhere where we need to be. We are still in a very dangerous situation."
"You had bodies lying in the streets exposed to dogs, in the absence of war, of natural disaster -- that has never happened in modern times, not due to disease," Swedish infectious disease expert Hans Rosling told me. In early July, Rosling wrote and advised the World Health Organization (WHO) that this Ebola epidemic was easily controllable, and that dedicating excessive resources to it would result in a net increase in deaths due to other ailments such as malaria, chronic diseases, and auto accidents. "You must blame me -- I missed it," Rosling told me, clearly bearing a weight of guilt. When he realized his mistake in September, Rosling took a leave from his professorial job at Uppsala University in Sweden and volunteered to work inside Liberia's Ministry of Health, where he has toiled since, crunching case and death toll numbers. Today Rosling accepts the U.S. CDC's dire predictions -- worst-case scenarios that assume no international response was mustered.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention then predicted that unless the world mobilized on a scale unprecedented in the history of disease outbreaks, the countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone could by Feb. 1, 2015 have a combined 1.4 million cases, including 980,000 deaths.
Just six weeks later, the picture is so markedly different that some Liberians talk about the epidemic using the past tense. And that worries Gasasira, the acting director of the WHO in Liberia, deeply.
"Over the last six weeks efforts by everybody have resulted in a scaled-up response. So now we are slightly ahead of the virus," Gasasira told me in his no-frills concrete WHO office. "But we are nowhere where we need to be. We are still in a very dangerous situation."
