Ebola’s lessons, painfully learned at great cost in dollars and human lives

In-Depth report on lessons to be learned from the Ebola crisis

THE WASHINGTON POST by By Lena H. Sun, Brady Dennis and Joel Achenbach                            Dec. 29, 2014

A year after it began, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa continues to be unpredictable, forcing governments and aid groups to improvise strategies as they chase a virus that is unencumbered by borders or bureaucracy.

The people fighting Ebola are coming up with lists of lessons learned — not only for the current battle, which has killed more than 7,500 people and is far from over, but also for future outbreaks of deadly contagions.

Alice Jallabah, head of a bushmeat seller group, holds dried bushmeat in Monrovia. (Zoom Dosso/AFP/Getty Images)

Many of the lessons are surprising and specific — the color of body bags turns out to be important, as does the design of Ebola clinics. The most common-sense lesson is that all Ebola is local; solutions can’t be dictated from Geneva or New York.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ebolas-lessons-painfully-learned-at-great-cost-in-dollars-and-human-lives/2014/12/28/dcc8c50a-87c2-11e4-a702-fa31ff4ae98e_story.html