Ebola is preventable | Health/Medicine |Axisoflogic.com

Cuban doctors on their way to help with Ebola (Cubanet)

Ebola is preventable, controllable, and curable, if the right things are prioritized.

Ebola, because of the way it is easily transmitted and that it kills, is a scary disease. However, the media, through disinformation and information omission, has blown that fear out of proportion. With a few basic steps at a personal level and on a larger scale, Ebola can be prevented, with no need for such alarm and sensationalism.

1. Raise awareness of symptoms and procedures
It is important to only focus on symptoms, and not a person's country of origin or where they look like they are from. Decisions to isolate, to ground a plane and so on, should be based on rationality, and information not discrimination.

Ebola is spread by contact with infected body fluids of someone with active symptoms. It is not an airborne disease. Its symptoms include: fever, severe headache, muscle pain, weakness, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain, and unexplained hemorrhage like bleeding or bruising. Symptoms may appear two to 21 days after exposure.

The methods for raising awareness can be creative, such as this mural (PL/Cubadebate)

2. Provide training, protective equipment, and sufficient health infrastructure.
Hospitals, both in the U.S, Europe, and in west African countries, nead sufficient protective equipment, and nurses and doctors need specific training in how to recognize and treat Ebola. The U.S. National Nurses United says it doesn't have enough protective equipment and is demanding Obama enforce the provision of uniforms, national standards and protocols. “Not one more patient, nurse, or health care worker should be put at risk due to a lack of health care facility preparedness,” states the union.

All those regions also need decent, basic, free health care. With that, outbreaks are easy to treat and prevent. According to a Lancet report by Ranu S Dhillon, Devabhaktuni Srikrishna, Jeffrey Sachs, and co., 60 to 90 percent of untreated patients in the West African countries die, while effective medical care would reduce that rate to below 30 percent. When healthcare is free and of high quality, people don't wait until the symptoms get worse (and more contagious) before seeking attention.

3. Invest in vaccines, instead of luxury, for profit medicine and surgery
According to a document by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, mass production of Ebola vaccines would cost US$73 million for 27 million doses. GlaxoSmithKline has a vaccine in development, likely ready for trials by early next year. The sad fact is though, almost a decade ago, scientists from Canada and the United States reported that they had created a 100 percent effective vaccine to the Ebola virus. Health officials were excited, but testing on people never happened and the vaccine sat on a shelf, because the medicine did not, and does not, have a profitable market – namely, at the time the few hundred people affected were from third world countries.

The World Health Organization has also confirmed that “several hundred thousand” vaccines will be produced in the first half of the year, but these should have been available a decade ago, preventing the death of now over 5,000 people.

4. Support recovery
Those people who do recover from Ebola develop antibodies that last for at least 10 years. Hence, helping patients recover is also a part of preventing Ebola, beyond preventing further contamination. That means, good supportive clinical care, and a health system people in any country trust enough and have access to so that they seek care sooner rather than later.

5. Quality isolation and control measures
With effective case identification, control steps, and isolation, Ebola in the most effected countries could be stopped in six months, according to the Lancet report.

Nigeria recently contained the spread of Ebola through a committed effort to diagnostic testing and contact tracing: seeking out all those who came into contact with infected people, isolating and testing them. According to the Lancet report, the “key to epidemic control is rapid diagnosis, isolation, and treatment of infected individuals.” People with Ebola-like symptoms need to be tested early, but without laboratory testing, early diagnosis is difficult, since Ebola symptoms are shared with many other infections, including malaria and typhoid.

Distinguishing a case of Ebola requires PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) blood testing. Such testing only takes a few hours, but there are currently fewer than two dozen established or planned laboratories equipped to use PCR in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia – the countries most effected by Ebola. While in previous Ebola outbreaks, all infected individuals and their contacts were known, in the current one, both of those factors are unknown. Therefore, testing is needed for anyone with symptoms, to minimize transmission. That means reaching people in their homes, sometimes in remote areas. People with symptoms should be isolated in their homes, but without effective treatment, that isolation is doomed to failure.

According to the Lancet report, if the affected governments and the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) “quickly adopt a bottom to top, integrated, and scaled up strategy,” which includes early diagnosis, secure transport, and effective treatment, the epidemic can be quickly contained.

6. International effort: real health priorities, pay back the debt to Africa, international cooperation
After centuries of stealing primary resources and human beings from Africa, and getting wealthy off that loot, the first world has a debt to the continent. It's long long overdue. Its time to take money out of war production and help provide effected countries with blood laboratories, hospitals, and health education and infrastructure that they can run. Further, its time to prioritise global health needs and real health research. Cuba, and the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) have been leading the way both in on the ground help (sending doctors), and in international cooperation – its time for the countries with the money to follow suit.

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