Johannesburg - The Ebola epidemic terrified communities and health workers, and killed nearly every second person affected. A year later, it’s still not over.
“We are now a year into the deadliest Ebola outbreak the world has ever seen, with at least 24 000 people infected and more than 10 000 deaths. Ebola has destroyed lives and families, left deep scars, and ripped at the social and economic fabric of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone,” said Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières or MSF) in a report released on Sunday on the first anniversary of the epidemic.
It was a virus without borders that took three months to detect.
“The virus cut a vast swathe through the three countries, in a cross-border geographical spread never seen before. Fear and panic set in, the sick and their families were desperate, and national health workers and MSF teams were overwhelmed and exhausted. Medical workers are not trained to deal with at least 50 percent of their patients dying from a disease for which no treatments exist.”
Health workers also died, including 14 from MSF, an international medical humanitarian organisation. Its report - “Pushed to the limit and beyond: a year into the largest Ebola outbreak ever” - assesses the response to the epidemic.
“The Ebola epidemic proved to be an exceptional event that exposed the reality of how inefficient and slow health and aid systems are to respond to emergencies,” MSF international president Dr Joanne Liu said.
The report said the true death toll caused by the epidemic would never be known as “the resulting collapse of health services means that untreated malaria, complicated deliveries and car crashes will have multiplied the direct Ebola deaths many times over”.
The collapse of routine health services meant that people stopped trusting those services, children missed vaccinations and HIV-positive patients interrupted treatment, MSF said.
A year after the epidemic started, it’s not over. It will not be counted as over until there have been no new cases in the region for 42 days.
“To declare an end to the outbreak, we must identify every last case, requiring a level of meticulous precision that is practically unique in medical humanitarian interventions in the field.
“There is no room for complacency: the number of new cases weekly is still higher than in any previous outbreak,” MSF pointed out.
The report said there had been no new cases in Liberia since early this month, but the overall number of cases in the region was fluctuating and “has not significantly declined” since January.
An MSF release added that patient numbers were again rising in Guinea, while in Sierra Leone, many people who were not previously on lists of known Ebola contacts were presenting with the virus.
The MSF report considered why the outbreak was so severe and the world’s response so slow.
“Was it due to fear, lack of political will, lack of expertise, or a perfect storm of all three?” asked the report, saying there were few simple answers.
“What also clearly emerges is that no one was prepared for the nightmarish spread and magnitude of this epidemic.
“The Ebola outbreak proved to be an exceptional event… ‘Business as usual’ was exposed on the world stage, with the loss of thousands of lives.
“What will we have learnt from these mistakes?”
For MSF, it was the first time the organisation had lost so many patients - 2 547 deaths - which MSF called catastrophically high and shocking, even to teams used to working in war zones.
It was also the first time that MSF had responded to viral haemorrhagic fever on such a large scale, with Ebola in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, Mali and Senegal, a separate Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Marburg fever in Uganda.
MSF sent more than 1 300 international staff to respond to Ebola, working with more than 4 000 local staff, and it set up 15 Ebola management and transit centres in three countries.
It set up its biggest centre yet, a 250-bed facility, and even shipped in incinerators to cremate bodies.
Also, a first was starting clinical trials of experimental treatments and vaccines in the midst of an outbreak.
*The MSF report is available at www.msf.org.
The Star