After seven weeks and 28 deaths, the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo appears to be contained. A recent statement from Oly Ilunga Kalenga, the country’s health minister, noted that all people who were potentially exposed to the Ebola virus have finished a 21-day incubation period, signaling that the country could soon declare the outbreak to be officially over.
A July 1, 2018 article in Vox examined how the response to this outbreak differed from previous outbreaks, including a campaign that delivered a newly developed Ebola vaccine to more than 3,200 people. “[The vaccine] had been previously tested and found to be quite effective,” said Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Ashish Jha, senior associate dean, research translation and global strategy, and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
Jha, however, cautioned that the world should not read too much into the successful response to a single outbreak. “The next big disease outbreak may very well come by an unknown pathogen — or a known pathogen in a place where we haven’t seen it before,” he said. “And is the world better prepared for that? I don’t think this tells us.”
Read the Vox article: Good news: the Ebola outbreak in DRC is contained
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Is WHO’s response to new Ebola outbreak symbolic or substantive? (Harvard Chan School news)