Ebola Diaries: Hitting the Ground Running

INFECTION CONTROL TODAY                                      March 24, 2015
The World Health Organization (WHO) is publishing a series, "Ebola Diaries," with first-person accounts of WHO staff and others deployed to the field for Ebola response since the first cases were reported in West Africa on March 23, 2014.
 
Dr. Stéphane Hugonnet, team lead for gobal capacities, alert and responses for the World Health Organization (WHO), was one of the first WHO experts sent to Guinea to investigate cases of Ebola reported in late March 2014. A medical doctor who has spent the past 20 years working for WHO, MSF and others, managing outbreaks ranging from cholera, measles and yellow fever, to Lassa, Ebola and meningitis, Hugonnet found a very different sort of outbreak when he arrived in Guinea.

"We were following this rumor of a small cluster of unexplained deaths in Guinea," he says. "Some thought it could be Lassa    phane fever, but the transmission pattern was very compatible with Ebola. When the lab results came back, we learned that there was Ebola Zaire in West Africa.            

 On March 25, I hit the ground running in Guinea as part of team made up of logisticians, a medical anthropologist, laboratory technicians, virologists and infection prevention and control specialists. My job was to rapidly assess the situation in the four affected districts, enhance surveillance and support the setting up of a mobile lab."

Hugonnet continues, "The day we left Conakry for Guékédou, Conakry confirmed its first case. It immediately became obvious that this outbreak was not like the others.
Read complete story.

http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/news/2015/03/ebola-diaries-hitting-the-ground-running.aspx

Also see
http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/news/2015/03/the-first-cases-of-ebola-originally-thought-to-be-caused-by-lassa-virus.aspx
and
WHO Diaries
http://www.who.int/features/2015/ebola-diaries-formenty/en/