It’s been almost two years since the first suspected case of ebola reached West Africa. A 2-year old boy in a remote jungle region of southern Guinea fell ill with the fever in December 2013, close to the border with Sierra Leone and Liberia. Since the outbreak, at least 11,300 people have been killed by disease.
But today is a good day in the fight against ebola: Sierra Leone is finally ebola-free.
This great news gives room to celebrate, but also room to learn. With the worst of the devastaion hopefully behind us, the world can now squarely face the lessons that emerged from the outbreak:
It’s not over until it’s over
At the end of August, I wrote about the moment the last known ebola patient at the time was discharged from Sierra Leone, caught on camera as she danced out the doors of the hospital. Whilst this was a beautiful moment, it was tempered by the knowledge the country would need to go 42 days without any new cases of ebola to be deemed ebola-free. When more cases were reported in Sierra Leone in September, the 42-day waiting period began again.
But now, the world can breathe more easily as Sierra Leone has officially been declared ebola-free.
This is great news, clearing the way for the country to finally enter a new phase in its recovery. Still, the virus continues to pose a threat to the region, with a number of ebola cases reported in neighbouring Guinea last month. And new evidence recently emerged to show the ebola virus can survive in a person’s semen up to 9 months after they have been cleared of the infection. So while the number of new infections is now under control, the race to end ebola will inevitably be a crawl, rather than a sprint.
Ripple effects
Once we’re clear of ebola, these regions will need to repair the damage wreaked by the disease. Ebola did not only destroy lives and families, it brought economies to a standstill. Livelihoods were lost as businesses shut down. Children stopped going to school and people stopped going to work. One of the most serious effects of the ebola crisis is its impact on food security. According to the director of the World Health Organisation: "The fertile fields of Lofa County, once Liberia's breadbasket, are now fallow. In that county alone, nearly 170 farmers and their family members have died from Ebola. In some areas, hunger has become an even greater concern than the virus."
More doctors, more hospitals, more medicines
The rapid escalation of the epidemic in 2014 and the mounting death toll that followed shows that the world simply was not ready for ebola. Stable healthcare systems are vital to containing a virus as contagious as ebola, so the West African regions most affected were at a disadvantage due to their already vulnerable healthcare systems. At the time of the outbreak, Liberia had 1.4 doctors for every 100,000 people (WHO). By comparison, Cuba has 591 doctors per 100,000 people. (As it turns out, Cuba deployed the most doctors of any country to ebola-stricken areas.) And without adequate methods of surveillance and containment, including protective equipment to prevent medical staff from catching the disease, the spread of a virus like ebola is almost impossible to halt.
Vaccines work (in ways we don’t always expect)
When I first heard a case of ebola had been reported in Lagos, I panicked. I have family there, but also, my overriding impression of the Nigerian megacity is that it is full of people. So full I wondered how they could ever contain such an infectious virus. However, Nigeria’s successful response to ebola shows how effective a strong healthcare system can be in the face of such threats. When a patient with ebola arrived in Nigeria from Liberia, Nigerian healthcare workers knew what to do. How? Because they had been trained in the fight against polio. The concerted efforts to wipe out polio in the country through vaccination programmes, as well as experience in containing an outbreak enabled the healthcare system to tackle multiple threats. Within 24-hours of ebola arriving in Lagos, Nigeria’s polio emergency operations centre was transformed into an ebola emergency centre and within a few weeks Nigeria was declared ebola-free.
There are thousands of brave people out there
Although Nigeria did successfully prevent a full-blown ebola outbreak, a Nigerian doctor died whilst treating the patient from Liberia. In the early months of the outbreak, before adequate protective supplies reached West Africa, many healthcare professionals like her fell victim to the disease they were trying to fight. As the virus caught the world’s attention, healthcare professionals from around the world stepped in to fill the gap. From Cuba to the United Kingdom, Medecins sans Frontieres and the International Medical Corps, doctors and volunteers travelled to join local staff on the ground in response to a truly global crisis. And local heroes like Maseray Kamara, a this woman who survived ebola and went on to join a burial team, are a powerful source of hope and courage, leading their communities on the road to recovery.
Maseray Kamara
Thanks to the dedication of local and international healthcare workers and volunteers, ebola is on its way out. Now that an ebola-free world is finally in sight, the international community must look back at its response to the crisis in order to prevent another outbreak of this scale.