Editorial

A United Fight Against Ebola

Posted

We can’t just close our eyes and hope Ebola goes away.

While the lethal virus continues its rampage through West Africa, the rest of the world needs to mobilize its resources and attack it for what it is: The most severe health emergency of the modern era.

That’s how the World Health Organization describes the outbreak; that’s how we see it too.

It’s true that the handful of cases in the United States and Europe have mainly been found in people who contracted it in West Africa. But alarms were raised in the developed world after two health care workers, one in Dallas, Texas, and one in Madrid, Spain, picked it up from Ebola patients brought to their hospitals for treatment.

The Dallas nurse was caring for a man newly arrived from Liberia; the Madrid nursing assistant was caring for two Spanish medical-missionary priests who got the disease from patients in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Both nurses were improving when CNY went to press this week, but their plight illustrates the rapid path that Ebola can take if left unchecked.

What to do? First and foremost, hospitals in the United States and Europe have to develop far stricter infection-control protocols than they have now to better protect their own workers and the general public.

Fortunately, our health care system is not deluged with cases and, with proper protocol in place, is well up to the task of caring for those few that we do get.

Then, there has to be a crisis-level worldwide effort—in funding and in science—to find effective treatments and vaccines. A similar effort is needed to build up the health care systems and conduct educational campaigns in places at risk of the disease. The United States and other developed countries can, and should, work in partnerships with humanitarian agencies like Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ overseas relief and development agency, which has committed financial and human resources to the prevention and management of Ebola in West Africa.

Michael Ghebrab, the CRS country representative in Sierra Leone, said that a recently announced plan by President Barack Obama to scale-up U.S. resources to help contain the outbreak will “meet some of the urgent need for medical equipment, logistical support and training health personnel that will help save lives in the short-term.”

Airport screenings of people traveling from the affected countries also need to be beefed up, possibly including short-term isolation before issuing visas.

None of these undertakings is beyond what we in the United States and the rest of the developed world can do, if we have the will.

It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that AIDS was a fearsome killer that no one had seen before. Almost immediately after it began showing up in patients, the CDC formed a task force to monitor the outbreak. Intensive education campaigns aimed at prevention sprung up in affected communities even before the virus we know as HIV was identified as the cause. Now, with a range of treatments available, HIV-infection has become, for many in this country, a chronic condition. Still serious, but no longer an automatic death sentence.

With Ebola, the science seems already to be halfway there. The virus was identified long ago and there are several promising, though scarce, treatments. Cultural and behavioral changes in affected areas are probably the most difficult to achieve, but the campaigns have to start sometime and now is the time.

Pope Francis, addressing the outbreak at his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square Sept. 24, said, “I hope the international community may provide much-needed help to alleviate the sufferings of our brothers and sisters.”

We hope, and pray, for that as well.