[From article]
Aug. 31 and immediately briefed President Obama by phone. The window to act was closing, he told the president in the 15-minute call.
That conversation, nearly six months after the World Health Organization (WHO) learned of an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, was part of a mounting realization among world leaders that the battle against the virus was being lost. As of early September, with more than 1,800 confirmed Ebola deaths in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, there was still no coordinated global response. Alarmed U.S. officials realized they would need to call in the military.
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Not until Aug. 8, 4 1 ⁄ 2 months into the epidemic, did the organization [WHO] declare a global emergency.
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"We cannot wait for those high-level meetings to convene and discuss over cocktails and petits fours what they're going to do," exclaimed Joanne Liu, international head of Doctors Without Borders,
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It is transmitted only through bodily fluids after the fever and other symptoms have occurred. But the incubation period, after infection and before the person becomes symptomatic, typically lasts about a week, or as long as three weeks. People who are infected can travel a great distance before they begin to shed the virus. Initial symptoms are similar to those caused by malaria and influenza, confounding a proper diagnosis.
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The virus spread from Guinea to Liberia, where two people died in late March. On April 1, Sierra Leone reported that two of its citizens had died in Guinea, probably from Ebola, and that their bodies had been returned to their native country.
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Early in this outbreak, the CDC ran into bureaucratic resistance from the WHO's regional office in Africa.
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On July 24, the WHO upgraded the crisis from a two to a three, the highest level, but it did not declare a global health emergency.
Even as health officials quickened their pace, the epidemic accelerated even faster. Scores of doctors and nurses were becoming sick, and many were dying,
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On Aug. 8, the WHO declared a global health emergency.
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He visited a clinic where 25 health-care workers became sick with Ebola and 23 died. Doctors kept going to work even as they were ostracized back home by fearful neighbors. “This is really a profound level of heroism,” Fukuda said.
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Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf criticized the response of her citizens to the epidemic. "We have been unable to control the spread due to continued denials, cultural burying practices, disregard for the advice of health workers and disrespect for the warnings by the government,"
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By early September, there was still no agreement among the major global health organizations and governments on how to respond to the epidemic.
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"Six months into the worst Ebola epidemic in history, the world is losing the battle to contain it," Liu, of Doctors Without Borders, told the United Nations on Sept. 2. For the first time, she implored countries to deploy their military assets
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Frieden showed up and had a dire warning: The response was like "using a pea shooter against a raging elephant."
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Currently, each infected person is infecting about two more. To slow the spread of the disease and eventually stop it, officials must somehow reverse the math. Only when each Ebola patient infects, on average, fewer than one person will the outbreak begin to fade.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/10/04/how-ebola-sped-out-of-control/
Out of control
How the world’s health organizations failed to stop the Ebola disaster
Story by Lena H. Sun, Brady Dennis, Lenny Bernstein, Joel Achenbach
Photos by Michel du Cille
Published on October 4, 2014
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