Ebola Response Impact on Public Health Programs, West Africa, 2014–2017

Abstract

Events such as the 2014–2015 West Africa epidemic of Ebola virus disease highlight the importance of the capacity to detect and respond to public health threats. We describe capacity-building efforts during and after the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea and public health progress that was made as a result of the Ebola response in 4 key areas: emergency response, laboratory capacity, surveillance, and workforce development. We further highlight ways in which capacity-building efforts such as those used in West Africa can be accelerated after a public health crisis to improve preparedness for future events.

Preparedness and vulnerability of African countries against importations of COVID-19: a modelling study

“…The aftermath of recent epidemics and pandemics (eg, severe acute respiratory syndrome, H1N1 pandemic, Middle East respiratory syndrome, and Ebola) have highlighted the need to reinforce national public health capabilities and infrastructures, including diseasesurveillance systems and laboratory networks, as well as human capacity (eg, training in surveillance, epidemic response, and diagnostic testing). 27,28 National public health capabilities and infrastructures remain at the core of global health security, because they are the first line of defence in infectious disease emergencies. 27 Crisis management plans should be ready in each African country; involvement of the international community should catalyse such preparedness.…”

Antiviral peptides as promising therapeutic drugs

“…Because of its specificity-it requires a phosphorylation step mediated by a viral protein-this molecule causes lower toxicity for the host when compared with previously used treatments [10,11]. Unfortunately, the low efficacy of antiviral treatments is still evidenced by the ever-increasing reports of viral resistance [12][13][14], concomitant viral infections [15], and the emergence and re-emergence of viral epidemics in relatively short periods of time, as observed for H1N1, Ebola and zika virus (ZIKV) only in the first 5 years of the present decade [16][17][18][19][20]. Therefore, the demand for production of new antiviral drugs is higher than ever, with increased preference for molecules capable of presenting broad-spectrum activity [21].…”

Ethnomedicinal Wisdom

“…Viruses are acellular ultra-microscopic metabolically inert obligate intracellular parasites of cellular hosts (Chattopadhyay et al, 2009b), associated with diverse diseases and are threats to human, wildlife, and livestock (Malosh et al, 2017;Marston et al, 2017;Prkno et al, 2017;Akbari and Elmi, 2017;Vu and Misra, 2018). Many are incurable and have no effective antiviral drugs except a very few (forty) US FDA approved antiviral drugs available for the management of some viral diseases.…”