World Health Organization declares Ebola outbreak officially over. AFP.

An aid worker responding to the Ebola crisis. AFP. 

The World Health Organization has declared the Ebola outbreak to be officially over as the last country, Liberia, has passed their waiting period with no new cases. AFP. The outbreak infected at least 29,000 people and killed 11,000, with many more victims suspected. At it's peak the disease was infecting hundreds of people a week in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Though the outbreak has been declared over, officials acknowledge the possibility that cases could pop up again. In Liberia, citizens took a skeptical view of the announcement, many noting that the outbreak in the country has officially ended before with new cases popping up soon after. Liberia had the most deaths from the outbreak, with 4,800 deaths, and was the last country to be declared Ebola free after the last two patients were released from the hospital last December. Global response to the outbreak was sluggish until returning aid workers caused mini-breakouts in America and Spain. With fears of a greater outbreak, the international community sent troops, supplies and doctors. Slowly the tide was turned. The outbreak had a devastating economic impact on the region and may have cost as much as $2.2 billion in countries that can ill afford it. 

My Comment:

It has been a long time coming but the outbreak is finally over. Hopefully this is the last time I have to write about Ebola. I have written extensively about this outbreak and to be honest it was never much fun. I won't have much new to post here, but at the very least I can breath a sigh of relief that it is all over. I don't know if I would say I am happy right now, but I will say that I am glad it is done. For awhile their it looked like all of West Africa was going to be consumed. As it stands right now they survived mostly intact, though with many thousands of people dead and billions of dollars lost. 

The truth is that we got very lucky that this outbreak wasn't worse then it was. Though the chances of the Ebola outbreak becoming a global epidemic were very small, it could have very well spread to other countries. I have said before, if the outbreak had made it to India, or anywhere in the Middle East where wars are raging right now, the death toll could have been much higher and the economic impact could have been devastating. The idea of Ebola making it to India, packed with people and with poor hygiene, or the Middle East, where no aid workers could assist due to violence, is a terrifying one. That didn't happen and it is a minor miracle that it didn't. 

There is a lot to criticize for the response to this outbreak. Clearly the international community did not respond well. The WHO organization could have stopped the outbreak much earlier but they never seemed to get a handle on how bad the situation was until it was too late. They had a chance to clamp down on new cases, but they just didn't understand how bad it really was. Nobody outside of the countries involved in the initial outbreak did much to stop the outbreak in the early days. My guess is that they thought it would just burn out like so many other Ebola outbreaks have done. That didn't happen, because the disease finally made it to a major city. After that happened, the outbreak became much more difficult to contain. 

The outbreak wasn't really taken seriously until hundreds of people were getting sick a week and people outside of Africa started getting sick as well. That spurred the kind of response that was needed from the start and eventually beat the virus back. Doctors traced the contacts of all who were infected and tried to isolate them. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Whole neighborhoods were isolated and whole villages were wiped out. Other countries had smaller outbreak, and to their credit, none of them went out of control like the ones in West Africa. Nigeria especially managed to contain their outbreak despite limited resources and political instability caused by Boko Haram.  

And the outbreak that happened in the United States should never of happened. To this day I cannot understand why we didn't close our borders against casual travel between our country and the infected ones. We never had to ban all travel, just stop people that had no critical reason to travel, and the outbreak here would have never happened. Thomas Eric Duncan, came here, got sick and infected two people and then died. Even if we couldn't have prevented him from coming, and we could have, we could have at least put him in a hospital that could handle Ebola. That didn't happen and we were very lucky that nobody else died. As it stands, that descion cost us quite a bit of money and caused a great deal of undue panic that could have been easily avoided. The issue was needlessly politicized and the left used it as a hammer to hit the right, even though the right ended up being correct about the threat. 

As for West Africa, I hope that they manage to turn it around. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea had been through quite a bit before this outbreak happened and they lost even more during the outbreak.  After all that has happened they deserve a break. And they still have major problems to this day. Malaria and other subtropical disease still run rampant in these countries and unlike Ebola, those problems won't get much in the way of international help. 

There is also a chance that Ebola could flair up again as well. We never quite figured out what Ebola's natural reservoir species is. We do know that Ebola can infect, but not harm, many species of bats. With Ebola moving into a new environment it could find a new species to act as a host until someone gets careless while hunting or slaughtering. At least the next time this happens, West Africa will have much more experience with dealing with this kind of outbreak and should be able to nip the outbreak in the bud. 

So what did we learn from the Ebola outbreak? Well, for one we learned that the international community wasn't quite prepared to fight a major viral outbreak in the third world. We did eventually beat it back, but the cost was way higher then we should have paid. We also learned that a viral outbreak could be politicized in America, as the opinion on banning travel broke down on tribal lines. Finally, we learned that misinformation will spread when an outbreak happens. To this day many people believe the lie that Ebola can never spread without direct contact with blood or bodily fluids, The virus isn't airborne, but in certain circumstances it can spread that way. 

Let's hope the next outbreak of any major virus goes better then Ebola does. We may never know how many people died in West Africa and I believe it far exceeds the number quoted above. Many more people died but we will never have a full accounting for the victims. And as bad as this outbreak was, it could be much worse next time. Considering the stakes, that's not a pleasant thought...