Motivation

Current situation

• World Health Organisation's index page on Ebola
• From WHO's fact sheet:
  • Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola haemorrhagic fever, is a severe, often fatal illness in humans.
  • The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission.
  • The average EVD case fatality rate is around 50%. Case fatality rates have varied from 25% to 90% in past outbreaks. (Note: current west Africa epidemic is on-going, so fatality rates are not easy to compute. Modelers have computed figures around 70%.)
  • The first EVD outbreaks occurred in remote villages in Central Africa, near tropical rainforests, but the most recent outbreak in west Africa has involved major urban as well as rural areas.
• WHO's situation reports. (We'll update it every now and then, specially if it changes the "what to do" picture.) 7470 (probable, confirmed and suspected) cases and 3431 deaths have been reported in the current outbreak of EVD up to the end of 1 October 2014 by the Ministries of Health of Guinea, and Sierra Leone, and up to the end of 30 September by the Ministry of Health of Liberia. Three countries have now reported a case or cases imported from a country with widespread and intense transmission: Nigeria (20 cases and 8 deaths), Senegal (1 case, no deaths), United States of America (1 case, 30 September 2014).
• (Link needed.) Some experts suggest real figures could be official figures multiplied by 2.5, because many cases are reported late or are not reported at all.

Possible futures

• (Link needed.) Modelers suggest the number of cases is doubling every 2-3 weeks. At this pace, figures of up to one million cases or more for the end of 2014 have been mentioned. This would be the upper boundary of the current trend, if unstopped.
• (Links needed.) Other "worse cases" have been suggested: extension of the epidemic within Africa (Mali, etc) or to other continents (Asia), the disease becoming endemic in the human population (not needing further re-seeding from fruit bats or other animals into human populations), the virus becoming more efficient at the current mode of transmission, or even the virus becoming capable of other transmission routes.
• The best way to avoid all those possible futures is to stop the current outbreak, and that's where most efforts should go. A small percentage of the efforts are needed to do surveillance and know things have changed (if and when they have), and to plan for such dire scenarios.

Open-source appropriate technology

• WHO and AT for Ebola: Due to the urgency of the Ebola outbreak and the WHO’s scale up of international response in west Africa, WHO is providing technical information on appropriate available essential medical devices which are indispensable for treatment centres, community-based units and other preventive activities, in affected and neighbouring countries.
• 2014 call for innovative technologies WHO is searching for innovative health technologies that can be used for infection prevention and control (IPC), diagnosis, and supportive care. 2014 call for innovative technologies.
• USAID Fighting Ebola: A Grand Challenge for Development.

What we could do

(... thinking ...)