Global Health Ebola Update 2/20

EBOLA

Lesson 5: Go Big
In the days after being named to direct Liberia’s Ebola response, Tolbert Nyenswah watched as the disease tore through his homeland. Dead bodies lay in the streets. Patients streamed in, 150 new cases each day. Panic ruled.

“It was a catastrophe, but the international effort was huge,” Nyenswah says now, amid the relative calm of an epidemic in decline, thanks to a global response and his leadership.

Efforts included new treatment units and laboratories as well as community mobilization. The first order, however, was to increase ambulances and burial teams to quickly and safely isolate the sick and remove contagious corpses. “A single body can infect a hundred others. All these efforts broke Ebola’s back,” he says.

Big crises, he asserts, require the biggest responses. “Ebola is not for Africa alone. It is for the world. The world came late,” Nyenswah says, “but it came large.”

Tolbert Nyenswah, MPH ’12, is senior assistant minister of Health & Social Welfare for Liberia.

Editor’s Note: This week we highlighted five lessons about Ebola from the new issue of ** Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=7d3ad39a78&e=9c1fcebfa3)
. Read the ** complete story by Andrew Myers (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=c0ed50688d&e=9c1fcebfa3)
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Related: Limited airborne transmission of Ebola is ‘very likely,’ new analysis says – ** Washington Post (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=b6fc0be375&e=9c1fcebfa3)


Related: Unsafe burials increase in Ebola-hit countries: World Health Organisation – ** The Economic Times (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=ef852257f9&e=9c1fcebfa3)

Related: CDC Ready to Vaccinate 6,000 Against Ebola in Sierra Leone – ** NBC (http://jhsph.us3.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=0a43ad874dbe00d8f0545cfef&id=636a6fe373&e=9c1fcebfa3)