pandemic « Berman Institute Bioethics Bulletin

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The WHO Finally Declared a Public Health Emergency Over Ebola

July 18, 2019

The outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been ongoing since last August. An emergency declaration “is an unambiguous global statement that the situation is dire,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

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We Must Prepare for the Next Pandemic

June 18, 2019

Bruce Schneier argues that we’ll have to battle both the disease and the fake news

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Ebola: A Public Health Response in Crisis

June 12, 2019

The outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is among the most deadly in history, and despite a slowing spread, public health experts say the situation isn’t likely to get better. Why?

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The Last Flue Pandemic Was a ‘Quiet Killer’

June 11, 2019

Ten years after swine flu, no one can predict the next one

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Large Ebola Outbreaks New Normal, Says WHO

June 7, 2019

The world is entering “a new phase” where big outbreaks of deadly diseases like Ebola are a “new normal”, the World Health Organization has warned

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Why It’s So Difficult for Scientists to Predict the Next Outbreak of a Dangerous Disease

February 14, 2019

A two-year-old boy in rural Guinea died of Ebola in December 2014. Over the next two years, almost 30,000 people in West Africa would be infected with the Ebola virus. Why, unlike previous 17 Ebola outbreaks, did this one grow so large, so quickly? What, if anything, can be done to prevent future outbreaks?

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Ebola Vaccine Is Having ‘Major Impact’ But Worries About Congo Outbreak Grow

December 11, 2018

As an Ebola outbreak in a conflict-plagued region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continues to spread after 4 months, there’s a glimmer of hope: An experimental Ebola vaccine appears to be helping the communities it reaches

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Ebola Vaccine Is Having ‘Major Impact’ But Worries About Congo Outbreak Grow

Tuesday, December 11th, 2018

More than 40,000 people have received the vaccine, by far the largest use of it since a trial in 2015 showed it worked well. The vaccine’s effectiveness in this outbreak has not been formally assessed. But Peter Salama, who heads the Ebola response for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, says, “I think it’s having a major impact.”

WHO, which works in concert with the DRC’s Ministry of Public Health, can’t distribute the vaccine as widely as it would like, however, because of limited supplies, Salama notes. And the obvious targets for vaccination—people who have had contact with cases—have been difficult to identify and reach because of the ongoing conflict; a small number of front-line health care workers have even been caught in the crossfire.

So far the outbreak has tallied some 500 cases, about half of whom have died, according to the DRC’s Ministry of Public Health. It spans a region of the DRC’s northeast that abuts four other countries, and Salama and many others worry about the deadly virus jumping a border, which would require separate response teams and boost the potential for wider spread by infecting people with increased transportation options. Without more financial and personnel support from wealthy countries, the situation could explode into a long-running calamity similar to the Ebola epidemic that devastated three West African countries from 2014 to 2016, warns an editorial published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). A consensus statement from 25 public health and policy experts published the same week in The Journal of the American Medical Association calls the outbreak “exceptionally” dangerous.

…continue reading ‘Ebola Vaccine Is Having ‘Major Impact’ But Worries About Congo Outbreak Grow’

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