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CDC director highlights lessons learned from Ebola epidemic

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Following reports this month that Liberia is now Ebola-free, CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden, MD, MPH, said one of the key lessons of the 2014 outbreak, which is still ongoing in parts of West Africa, was that local health response capabilities across the continent must improve.

Speaking during a panel hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual Africa BrainTrust event today, Frieden added that the international community has a responsibility to step in when local resources are overwhelmed.

Thomas R. Frieden

“ … One of the things we’re most excited about is building the capacity of countries in Africa, and one of the best ways we do that is something called the Field Epidemiology Training Program,” Frieden said. “Quite simply, this is training disease detectives to do what we can do, so we don’t have to be there. … Training people so that CDC is no longer the 911 for the world — each country has its own 911.”

According to Frieden, there were three key lessons to take away from the epidemic and the world’s response to it.

The first lesson is that every nation has a responsibility to “improve its system of finding, stopping and preventing health threats,” and that the global community should help each country strengthen their own system of responding to those threats.

“The key second lesson is that the international community is also responsible, and needs to be able to surge in rapidly when national capacities are overwhelmed, but national capacities will always be quicker, more cost efficient and more effective, and so global response has to work through the national capacity,” he said.

The third lesson is the importance of infection control. According to Frieden, working with local communities in Liberia to safely isolate and care for patients with Ebola, before international aid workers could arrive, was crucial in “breaking the back of the epidemic.”

The West African Ebola outbreak began in December 2013. The epidemic ravaged communities throughout Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, killing more than 11,300 people. In August 2014, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern.”

If the world community had done nothing, an estimated 1 million people would have been infected, he added.

Joining Frieden on the panel was Ambassador Deborah L. Birx, MD, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator and U.S. special representative for global health diplomacy at the State Department. Describing how AIDS in Africa is far from “under control,” with an estimated 43,000 new infections each week, she also emphasized the need for a modern healthcare infrastructure throughout the continent.

“Are we building and supporting a health center system for the 20^th Century, or the 21^st Century?” Birx said. “ ... Africa has urbanized, Africa has changed and now we need a health system that supports where Africa is going and not where Africa has been.” – by Jason Laday