How to Stop Ebola – and the Next Outbreak

(Co-authored by African Union Commission Chairperson Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma)

For only the third time in its 66-year history, the World Health Organization has declared a global public health emergency. This time it is for the Ebola outbreak in the three West African countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. After their traumatic ordeal in recent months, governments and communities in those three countries are looking desperately for signs Ebola can be stopped in its tracks.

As medical doctors who understand Africa and infectious disease control, we are confident the response plan led by the three countries and the World Health Organization can contain this Ebola outbreak, and, in a matter of months, extinguish it. Let’s also keep in mind that this is not an African problem, but a humanitarian one that happens to occur in a small part of Africa.

The emergency response to Ebola must focus on four key areas.

1: Support for Health Workers

Health workers on the front lines of this epidemic have paid too great a price. Nearly 100 have lost their lives tending to the sick. We need to deliver proper protective equipment, give health workers access to the necessary supplies, provide pay commensurate with their heroic work, and make available immediate high-quality care should they fall ill. The World Bank Group announced $200 million to help contain the spread of Ebola, and some of this funding will be aimed at providing immediate support for health workers.

2. Shortages of Doctors and Supplies

Liberia has one physician for every 70,000 people, Sierra Leone one for every 45,000. The United Kingdom, in contrast, has a physician for every 360 people, the United States one for every 410. We need to move quickly to deploy more health workers and provide more mobile laboratories, more clinics, and more rapid testing equipment.

3. Educating Communities about the Disease

Countries and their international partners need to communicate about Ebola much more effectively. The Ebola virus is transmitted to people from wild animals. The virus spreads through human-to-human transmission, with infection resulting from direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people, and indirect contact with contaminated environments. The quicker patients receive health services, including being rehydrated with intravenous fluids, the faster they can recover.

4. Building Stronger Health Systems

These three countries need to strengthen their health systems so that when another outbreak of an infectious disease occurs, they will be able to respond more effectively. Ebola could return again, or a new infectious pathogen could jump from the animal world into ours. Part of the solution is stronger public health and veterinary surveillance systems that spot and prevent new diseases before they get a lethal foothold in the general population. The cost of building more effective health systems isn’t minor – fully half of the World Bank’s $200 million emergency package to fight this outbreak will go toward this goal – but it pales in comparison to the human and economic losses already suffered from the Ebola outbreak. We need to build functioning, affordable public care systems that can prevent, detect, and respond to these kinds of epidemics much earlier.

The international community is now starting to come to the aid of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. We must acknowledge, though, that this tragedy is a wake-up call. We all knew the health systems in these three countries, and in many others in the developing world, were extremely weak and could not effectively contain an infectious disease outbreak such as this Ebola epidemic, and that we lacked regional institutional capacity in Africa for disease prevention and control.

Now we are witnessing the results of our acceptance of the status quo. We will be able to stop Ebola in the coming weeks and months, but that won’t be the end of the story. Will we also build a strong enough health system to stop the next outbreak? We believe that it is a moral and economic imperative to do so, and all of us must work toward that goal.

(Photo: ? Trevor Samson/World Bank)