epidemic control
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201511091951.html
This article talks about an international response that was headed by the UK to end ebola in Sierra. This article states that the UK funded 6 treatment centers and also trained over 4,000 Sierra Leonean and international health care workers. The article goes on to list the various other things that the UK did to support the end of the ebola epidemic such as deploy over 150 NHS volunteers to support over 1,500 treatment and isolation beds, set up a 36-bed mobile field hospital, run three new laboratories to test over a third of all samples across the country, and deliver 2,800 tonnes of aide. The support that UK is giving to this cause is still ongoing as they work on Ebola vaccines and work with the survivors as to reduce the potential risk of Ebola transmission.
This article is closely related with the subject of epidemics that we learned in class. We learned if R0 )the basic reproductive number) is less than 1, then the disease will, with a probability of 1, die out after a finite number of waves. This means that to end an epidemic we must somehow reduce the basic reproductive number R0 to a low a number as possible. if the R0 is above 1, the disease will persist with a positive probability. All the things that the UK has done listed in the paragraph above is related to trying to decrease R0. By building 6 treatment centers and by training over 4,000 international health care workers, the possibility of ebola patients infecting other people decrease as ebola patients will be sent to these new treatment centers and the health care workers will take care of the patients in these new facilities. The same goes for deploying 150 volunteers to support over 1,500 treatment and isolation beds, the 36-bed mobile field hospital. These facilities will reduce the chance of ebola patients transmitting the disease to other people as they will have less chance to meet new people and the workers will make sure to try their hardest to give the best care to these patients. The laboratories helped aver 56,600 ebola cases according to the article and this is because ebola patients can be identified early so they chance to meet people and infect them decrease immensely. All these efforts reduce the R0 and the only evidence that the R0 has been pushed to below 1 is when the people infected with ebola decrease steadily. It does not state clearly in the article if the overall ebola patient count in the country has decreased. The article only mentions the fact that the labs have helped prevent thousands of cases of ebola but since the article goes on to talk about helping the country recover from the ebola crisis I think we can assume that these efforts have helped push the R0 to below 1.