“Ebola was not the exception. Ebola is a precedent.”
This warning, featured in
a searing documentary
from PBS’ Frontline that airs Tuesday nationwide, comes from Dr. Bruce Aylward
of the World Health Organization, who was at the center of troubled efforts to
curb the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Mashable reports:
The episode, like many
aired by the award-winning journalism program, is at once infuriating,
frightening and mobilizing. It should also be required viewing for anyone who
wants to know more about the outbreak than panicked panels of pundits on CNN,
or ambulance chases from airports in Western nations where a handful of health
workers were treated.
The documentary sounds
the alarm: The world was not prepared to deal with a disease that crossed
borders and spread rapidly. More outbreaks like this one will occur as new
diseases emerge from an increasingly crowded and resource-constrained world,
especially one in which people are encroaching into previously wild habitat.
That provides ideal
conditions for so-called zoonotic diseases to jump from species to species.
The hour-long episode is
a damning indictment of everyone who failed to save lives when they had the
chance. The government ministers in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are
blamed, as well as the bumbling bureaucracy of the U.N.’s World Health
Organization (WHO). None of them saw the onslaught before it was right on top
of them.
Ultimately, the outbreak
killed at least 10,892 people, according to the latest tally (though the
documentary notes the actual tally is likely far higher). The episode does not
waste time rehashing what we already knew about the disease, and puts the focus
on putting a human face on those who suffered the most.
Filmmaker and journalist
Dan Edge spent four months in West Africa, retracing Ebola’s steps back to a
single tree at the remote Meliandu village in Guinea. That's where it is
thought that bats — a suspected disease reservoir for Ebola and other pathogens
— first transmitted the disease to humans in December of 2014, well before
anyone at the CDC in Atlanta or the WHO in Geneva heard about the outbreak.
In an interview with Mashable,
Edge says one key lesson that emerged from his team’s reporting is that the
disease surveillance in West Africa, and indeed much of the developing world,
is “woefully inadequate.”
In the case of Ebola, the
outbreak “was not identified as an Ebola outbreak for nearly four months,” he
said. “The world is not set up in such a way to deal with cross-border
epidemics.”
One key piece of evidence
that the documentary details: The role that a small American company, Metabiota
of San Francisco, played in advising the Sierra Leonean government in how to
respond to the building crisis.
The company already had a
presence in the country researching tropical diseases. By its own admission,
the company had no experience dealing with Ebola. Still, the government
listened to its input rather than humanitarian groups on the front lines, like
Doctors Without Borders, which had extensive experience handling Ebola cases
and was sounding the alarm to anyone who would listen that the outbreak was way
out of control and spreading fast.
Interestingly, Metabiota
staff published a peer reviewed study on April 20 in PLOS Currents Outbreaks on
Ebola’s emergence in Sierra Leone. The study makes no mention of the company’s
role in advising the government on the proper response to contain the outbreak.
“Healthcare systems must
be immediately alerted and communication through regional networks must be
enacted in a manner that permits quick adaptation to the rapidly evolving
situation,” the study, published April 20, says about a successful Ebola
intervention program.
Perhaps no organization
emerges from this episode more bruised than the WHO, which is headquartered in
Geneva.
Evans says it was obvious
that the WHO, which exists to aid governments in responding to public health
threats, was “impotent” in the face of the outbreak — but this was partly by
design. “They had no army of medics ready to deploy," he said. “They’re
not a clinical organization.”
That should change, Evans
says: “Now is the time, the small window of opportunity when the horror of the
outbreak is still very fresh in our minds."
The WHO announced reforms
late last month that would address some of the shortcomings. But Evans is not
optimistic they’ll be acted upon.
While filming in remote
Guinea, where deforestation and mining is encroaching on more formerly wild
territory, Evans says was aware of how quickly he could have traveled to the
capital, then hopped a flight to London or Paris or New York.
“The
world is connected in a way that it never has been before,” he said. “There is
no such thing as a far-away place anymore.”
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