First of all, for weeks and weeks no one even knew what was the matter with all of these patients. They were all just falling ill abruptly and as little as a day later they were pronounced dead. Ebola was not even a thought on any of the medical officials' minds. People in the communities even thought that the epidemic was nothing but a rumor and a conspiracy for the doctors to practice cannibalism. As a result of this, the treatment for the disease was not available right away and worse, the doctors and nurses were not treating the cases as seriously as they should have. They should have kept the patients contained and kept themselves protected from the air around the patients. Ebola is spread so easily and so quickly. So, for several weeks the medics were not following protocol for the ebola disease, resulting in the rapid spread of the disease. Even when the people found out that ebola was the deadly virus spreading, some believed this to be false and angrily left their treatment facilities and took to the streets, thus infecting more and more people.
For an extended period of time, utter chaos ensued. Infected peoples were traveling around to different nations, unaware that they were becoming responsible for the deaths of hundreds more people. One girl traveled to Sierra Leone without anyone knowing and so the government of Sierra Leone believed that they were safe from the virus when in actuality, this was far from the truth. When family members and friends died, people rushed the sides of the dead bodies to wash, dress, pray over, and bury them. Dead bodies are seriously dangerous to be around and doing so almost guarantees a person to become infected. Again, the lack of information the people in Africa had was astounding.
Although it is easy to say that Americans should have done more to help the situation in Africa, I think that it is difficult to require people to willingly travel to deadly areas where they are at serious risk of becoming infected. I think the real problem lies in the fact that no one in the area, not even the doctors, knew what was going on or how to even begin to treat it. Obviously this is a difficult, expensive, timely issue to address. To fix this problem would mean spending millions and millions of dollars on hospitals in the area and education for the medical officials. However, considering how poorly the ebola situation was handled, it is definitely an investment worth making. In this case, I don't think the hysteria of the ebola was far off from the reality of the situation. It is shocking how much of a nightmare the spread was and how everything that could have gone wrong, really did go wrong.
In terms of how people communicated about the conflict, it seemed that patients and citizens alike should have had more trust in the doctors, hospitals and other resources.Then people that were affected could at least have themselves check out to even see if they had the disease as oppose to believing any rumors.
ReplyDeleteDoctors and others should have been educated enough or had the resources to be aware that it was happening early on to help prevent it by keeping it more concentrated. More preparation would have allowed less spreading of the disease.
The border issue between Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia should have all been more secured during this time. Once the disease broke and say this decision was made then the disease would not have spread nearly as much.
I think that overall, the problem continued because of the various issues the countries that faced it had before that couldn't prevent it. If there was more medical supplies both at hospitals and in ambulances that would certainly help. The other scare resource was that there weren't enough ambulances to quickly get the sick to the WHO location or a functioning hospital I also agree that sending foreigners could easily make the problem worse.
It is hard for victims to trust a medical system that has failed them in the past. Unfortunately, the area that first broke out with the epidemic did not have the resources or the knowledge to quickly identify and therefore prevent further outbreak. Prevention is nearly impossible because the breakout of these diseases tends to occur in areas where medicine and resources are scarce. To make matters worse, the international community failed to respond quickly. According to Al Jazeera, The World Health Organization did not begin to respond to the problem until the second wave of the disease had hit; their response followed the infection of a US doctor and Spanish nurse. International organizations tend to ignore third world problems until they start effecting first world citizens (who already have access to more advanced methods of health care). Waiting until the Western world is effected obscures the main reasons for the creation of these international organizations, to help those who need it most.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the biggest problems was that the WHO sat back and left the Guinea government, who had never dealt with Ebola before, take matters into their own hands. The WHO knew what Ebola was, and although they had never experienced it this bad before, they were the only people who had worked with it. So, they should have taken the lead from the start. How rapid the disease was going around and how quickly/many people were dying, should have been a state of emergency situation. They should have not waited it out. So many more lives could have been saved, if they would have paid attention. Realizing that this was not an ordinary everyday flu. Governments and organizations like the WHO need to start preparing for outbreaks like Ebola. It is one thing dive into prevention, but preparing for an outbreak and being ready is a major must.
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