http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-...rid7|htmlws-main-bb|dl7|sec3_lnk4&pLid=523717
Scrubs: check. Gum boots: check. Gloves: check. Tychem suit: check. Mask: check. Hood: check. Apron: check. Goggles: check. Gloves again: check. "Ready?" I ask the Liberian nurse assisting me. She shakes her head and grabs a small strip of duct tape, covering the space between my hood and goggles where a thin slice of skin was showing. "Now ready," she replies.
snip
For decades now, Ebola has been the Hollywood star of diseases, capturing the public's imagination with its exotic name, high fatality, and the added fear factor that it can cause people to bleed from odd places. Until recently, though, if you had asked any global health expert about the scary diseases that keep them up at night, Ebola would not have made their list. Just this past May, at a humanitarian conference I attended in London, one speaker presented some early data collected from Gueckedou, Guinea, where the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa began. After the presentation, one man in the packed audience raised his hand to ask: "Why are we even talking about this disease? After all, it only kills maybe a hundred people every couple years."
As of this week, Ebola is killing a hundred people every couple days in West Africa, and there will never be another conference where someone raises their hand to ask that question.
snip
It is not Ebola alone causing the catastrophe in West Africa today -- it is an epidemic of fear.
What makes Ebola different from so many other public health threats is the effect it has on healthcare workers, and as a result, on the entire healthcare system. To put it bluntly, Ebola kills nurses and doctors, almost preferentially.
snip
But the toll that Ebola has taken on clinicians and public health professionals alike means that the very people who calmed our fears in the past, who talked us through other epidemics and assured us that everything was going to be okay if we only kept calm and did A, B, and C, are now running scared themselves. And that is frightening indeed.
snip
Up until now, it has been local nurses and doctors who have borne the brunt of this epidemic, working long hours to care for desperate patients without the proper protection as their colleagues fell ill around them. Yet even now, the vast majority of them are more than willing to come back to work once their safety is ensured by the introduction of protective equipment and protocols. The necessary protective equipment isn't cheap though, and the impoverished countries of West Africa will never be able to afford it on their own. And as brave and heroic as they are, there simply aren't enough trained doctors and nurses here to stem the tide of this epidemic on their own.
There is a dire need for the international community to stop treating this crisis like a horror movie, closing its eyes tightly until the scary part is over, and start treating it like a real humanitarian disaster that requires an adequate input of monetary, logistical, and yes, human resources. It is true that most humanitarian emergencies cannot actually be solved by humanitarians alone, but this crisis is an exception to the rule. A sufficient supply of experienced international aid workers, including nurses, doctors, epidemiologists, sanitation engineers, lab technicians and logisticians, provided with the proper protection and resources, could bring this particular crisis to a halt in a matter of months.
snip
If the international community is willing to invest the necessary resources now, within a year or so we could all be dancing together as a planet, celebrating the full recovery of the Ebola-stricken nations of West Africa. If we fail to act soon, however, we are going to need some very large, nation-sized body bags.
Scrubs: check. Gum boots: check. Gloves: check. Tychem suit: check. Mask: check. Hood: check. Apron: check. Goggles: check. Gloves again: check. "Ready?" I ask the Liberian nurse assisting me. She shakes her head and grabs a small strip of duct tape, covering the space between my hood and goggles where a thin slice of skin was showing. "Now ready," she replies.
snip
For decades now, Ebola has been the Hollywood star of diseases, capturing the public's imagination with its exotic name, high fatality, and the added fear factor that it can cause people to bleed from odd places. Until recently, though, if you had asked any global health expert about the scary diseases that keep them up at night, Ebola would not have made their list. Just this past May, at a humanitarian conference I attended in London, one speaker presented some early data collected from Gueckedou, Guinea, where the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa began. After the presentation, one man in the packed audience raised his hand to ask: "Why are we even talking about this disease? After all, it only kills maybe a hundred people every couple years."
As of this week, Ebola is killing a hundred people every couple days in West Africa, and there will never be another conference where someone raises their hand to ask that question.
snip
It is not Ebola alone causing the catastrophe in West Africa today -- it is an epidemic of fear.
What makes Ebola different from so many other public health threats is the effect it has on healthcare workers, and as a result, on the entire healthcare system. To put it bluntly, Ebola kills nurses and doctors, almost preferentially.
snip
But the toll that Ebola has taken on clinicians and public health professionals alike means that the very people who calmed our fears in the past, who talked us through other epidemics and assured us that everything was going to be okay if we only kept calm and did A, B, and C, are now running scared themselves. And that is frightening indeed.
snip
Up until now, it has been local nurses and doctors who have borne the brunt of this epidemic, working long hours to care for desperate patients without the proper protection as their colleagues fell ill around them. Yet even now, the vast majority of them are more than willing to come back to work once their safety is ensured by the introduction of protective equipment and protocols. The necessary protective equipment isn't cheap though, and the impoverished countries of West Africa will never be able to afford it on their own. And as brave and heroic as they are, there simply aren't enough trained doctors and nurses here to stem the tide of this epidemic on their own.
There is a dire need for the international community to stop treating this crisis like a horror movie, closing its eyes tightly until the scary part is over, and start treating it like a real humanitarian disaster that requires an adequate input of monetary, logistical, and yes, human resources. It is true that most humanitarian emergencies cannot actually be solved by humanitarians alone, but this crisis is an exception to the rule. A sufficient supply of experienced international aid workers, including nurses, doctors, epidemiologists, sanitation engineers, lab technicians and logisticians, provided with the proper protection and resources, could bring this particular crisis to a halt in a matter of months.
snip
If the international community is willing to invest the necessary resources now, within a year or so we could all be dancing together as a planet, celebrating the full recovery of the Ebola-stricken nations of West Africa. If we fail to act soon, however, we are going to need some very large, nation-sized body bags.