This Ebola outbreak is on track to be the deadliest in…
0 reactions
This Ebola outbreak is on track to be the deadliest in history. Why?
If the current trajectory holds, the ongoing outbreak in DRC will likely become the largest Ebola outbreak on record.
This should not be so surprising. Africa CDC (which is co-leading the control effort) warned a month ago that this was possible. And the World Health Organization (the other co-leader) also just announced that the disease is already spreading faster than any Ebola outbreak in history.
According to Africa CDC, the benchmark for whether a control effort is staying ahead of the outbreak, rather than chasing it, has to do with how much of the spread is traceable. **It’s that at least 80 percent of new cases should appear among people responders had already identified and were monitoring**, rather than being discovered only after someone becomes sick.
Unfortunately, we’re at the exact opposite point. As Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu at the WHO recently warned that **“80 per cent of new cases” are instead “coming to us from unknown chains of transmission.”**
The biggest question is what, exactly, is driving this historic surge? We have already covered why conflict, mistrust and dysfunctional health systems make eastern DRC such punishing terrain for an Ebola response. But many of those same problems were present in 2018, when a similar outbreak was contained with fewer cases than this one likely has now. What is so different this time?
#local
If the current trajectory holds, the ongoing outbreak in DRC will likely become the largest Ebola outbreak on record.
This should not be so surprising. Africa CDC (which is co-leading the control effort) warned a month ago that this was possible. And the World Health Organization (the other co-leader) also just announced that the disease is already spreading faster than any Ebola outbreak in history.
According to Africa CDC, the benchmark for whether a control effort is staying ahead of the outbreak, rather than chasing it, has to do with how much of the spread is traceable. **It’s that at least 80 percent of new cases should appear among people responders had already identified and were monitoring**, rather than being discovered only after someone becomes sick.
Unfortunately, we’re at the exact opposite point. As Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu at the WHO recently warned that **“80 per cent of new cases” are instead “coming to us from unknown chains of transmission.”**
The biggest question is what, exactly, is driving this historic surge? We have already covered why conflict, mistrust and dysfunctional health systems make eastern DRC such punishing terrain for an Ebola response. But many of those same problems were present in 2018, when a similar outbreak was contained with fewer cases than this one likely has now. What is so different this time?
#local
| 1,000 mlx | |
| 3 | |
| 0 |