The Shifting Ebola Epidemic
NYTimes.com
NOV. 15, 2014
Recent gains in controlling the Ebola epidemic in West Africa have been encouraging, but they offer no reason for complacency. In Liberia, the hardest-hit country, the rate of new infections has declined in some areas, and several treatment units have been reporting empty beds for more than a month. But in adjacent Sierra Leone the number of new cases has shot upward, while in Guinea, where the epidemic started, the incidence of new cases appears to have stabilized over all, with growth in some districts and declines in others. All told, Ebola has infected more than 14,000 people in West Africa and killed more than 5,000 of them.
Liberia’s gains have been attributed to much safer burial practices, a vigorous campaign to educate the public on how to avoid infection, diagnostic tests that can quickly identify and isolate infected people, and teams that track down all of their contacts. As positive as these results are, there is no guarantee that they will hold. Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, may have acted prematurely last Thursday when she announced an end to a national state of emergency. The recent improvements were mostly in Monrovia, and new outbreaks have emerged in rural areas.
Alarmingly, the virus has twice been carried from Guinea into previously unaffected Mali. This is the kind of spread that experts have warned could lead to a widening epidemic throughout Africa unless it is tamped down quickly. An infected 2-year-old girl from Guinea died in Mali but does not seem to have spread the virus to others. An infected imam from Guinea died of Ebola in Mali, as have two others, including a nurse who treated him. Hundreds of others may have been infected at a ritual washing ceremony of the imam’s body or through other contact.
These developments suggest that donor nations need to increase their contributions of money, materials, and teams of doctors and nurses to fight the epidemic. Oxfam, an international aid organization, reported last Wednesday on the performance of members of the Group of 20 advanced and emerging economies. It said that four countries — Argentina, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — have yet to make any contribution and that four others — Brazil, India, Mexico and Russia — should be doing a lot more based on the size of their economies. It called on France to speed up its efforts in Guinea, a former French colony. It is hoping the issue of more aid will be discussed and acted on at the G-20 meeting in Brisbane, Australia, this weekend.
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