Ebola containment requires international collaboration

Pardis Sabeti, associate professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard School of Public Health and senior associate member of the Broad Institute, supervised a recent study that traced the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone to 14 women who attended a funeral in Guinea and brought home the virus.

Sabeti described the study — during the course of which several colleagues in Sierra Leone succumbed to the disease — in a New York Times opinion piece titled Studying Ebola, then dying from it published online September 5, 2014.

“As the virus reaches new villages and now large cities, the challenge of full-scale containment increases by orders of magnitude,” she wrote. “We need governments and international organizations to immediately send out response teams to all sites with active cases, and to train many more people on the ground.” She also called for creative solutions to combat the epidemic, citing recent public information campaigns and accelerated drug and vaccine trials.

“We must end this outbreak, both to honor the memory of those who have died, and to aid those still in the path of the virus. And then we must make sure that it never happens again.”