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Column: West must step up to battle Ebola

Epidemics have cursed mankind for thousands of years. Ebola is new. It only appeared in 1976, in a village situated near the Ebola River in the Congo, hence its name.
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Epidemics have cursed mankind for thousands of years. Ebola is new. It only appeared in 1976, in a village situated near the Ebola River in the Congo, hence its name.

Infected individuals rarely had a chance to travel and spread the disease beyond their remote villages because the virus killed most of its victims. In April of this year, Ebola was diagnosed in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, with two million residents.

There is no known cure for this highly contagious virus.

And there is good reason to fear contagion. Last week, Senegal became the fifth West African country to report a case, carried by a student in Guinea to Senegal’s capital, Dakar. There have been seven confirmed deaths in Nigeria, after an infected traveller from Liberia brought the disease into that country. The spread of infection is now picking up speed.

The virus entered the human population through the handling of infected animals, much like a number of other infectious diseases. AIDS began in the 1920s, on the border between Cameroon and the Congo, following viral transfer from a chimpanzee. Because it was only identified as a new disease in 1981, the virus spread to every corner of the globe.

SARS spread from small mammals to humans in China in 2002 and then spread globally. There were fatalities in Toronto. A new strain of influenza, H1N1, was identified in Mexico in 2009. It followed contact between pigs and humans. People fell ill in New York City a few days later and around the world a few weeks thereafter.

I looked after patients in Sudbury’s Intensive Care Units. The world was lucky that H1N1 was not a deadly strain of influenza like the one in 1918 that killed three to five per cent of the world's population.

In our increasingly interconnected world — where diseases can quickly spread from remote villages to huge cities — this Ebola epidemic is exposing holes in our ability to tackle outbreaks.

Unlike the recent SARS and flu epidemics, which struck countries that had strong governments and ample money to take action, the Ebola outbreak has occurred in nations that often lack basic health care, much less possess the ability to control the spread of highly contagious diseases.

Hospitals lack basic essentials like running water, protective gowns and gloves. Many doctors and nurses caught the virus from their patients, passed it to others, and died.

People do know what should be done. Swift response helped Firestone, the tire manufacturer, contain Ebola when an employee at its plant in Liberia became infected. The company built isolation rooms and identified 73 contacts of the infected individual, then placed them in isolation rooms for 21 days.

Eleven of those employees became ill and were treated in an isolated ward built by the company. The effort completely stopped the spread of the virus in the facility.

The World Health Organization’s plan of action calls for $490 million from donors, and thousands of foreign and local health workers to contain the outbreak. Few foreign medical teams have answered the call so far.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, an international medical aid organization, says “six months into the worst Ebola epidemic in history, the world is losing the battle to contain it.”

MSF is repeating its calls for nations with civilian and military biological disaster response capacities to send equipment and teams to West Africa.

Meanwhile, 40 per cent of the total number of reported cases of Ebola have occurred within the past three weeks. This is war against a deadly enemy and right now, it appears the enemy is winning.

Dr. Peter Zalan is president of the medical staff at Health Sciences North.

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