Ending the Ebola Outbreak

Months of declining cases have fed hopes that the Ebola outbreak might finally be ending. “There are now 10 times fewer people diagnosed with Ebola each week than there were in September last year,”said Dr. David Nabarro, the United Nation’s special envoy on the Ebola crisis.

The number of new Ebola cases fell rapidly in December and January, but officials with the United Nations and the World Health Organization cautioned that ending the outbreak entirely would be extremely difficult.

“The outbreak still presents a grave threat,” Dr. Nabarro said. “We have to really work hard to get to what we call zero-zero — zero cases, zero transmissions.”

An uptick in new cases at the end of January in Sierra Leone and Guinea shows that the virus will not go away easily. To get to zero cases, public health workers must now trace and isolate every contact of each Ebola patient to prevent new chains of transmission. But people who may have had contact with the virus are reluctant to admit it because of the stigma attached to the disease. And as the outbreak wanes in some areas, people are beginning to travel more, which could help the disease to spread again.

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http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/24/world/africa/2015-02-24-ebola-outbreak.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0