Abstract
The 2013 outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in West Africa constituted a major humanitarian crisis. The outbreak numbered over 28,500 cases, more than 10 times the number cumulatively registered from all previous EVD outbreaks combined, with at least 11,000 deaths, and resulted in billions of dollars of lost economic growth to an already impoverished region. The unprecedented scale of West Africa 2013 took the world by surprise and laid bare deficiencies in our response capacity to complex humanitarian disasters of highly infectious and lethal pathogens. However, the magnitude of West Africa 2013 also provided a unique opportunity and obligation to better understand not only the biology and epidemiology of EVD, but also the many scientific, economic, social, political, ethical, and logistical challenges in confronting emerging infectious diseases in the modern era.
This article is dedicated to the many health workers who sacrificed their time, energy and, all too often their lives, to combat the Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa (Bausch et al. 2014).
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Ian Crozier and Jens Kuhn for critical review of the manuscript and Lara Schwarz for administrative assistance.
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Bausch, D.G. (2017). West Africa 2013 Ebola: From Virus Outbreak to Humanitarian Crisis. In: Mühlberger, E., Hensley, L., Towner, J. (eds) Marburg- and Ebolaviruses. Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology, vol 411. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/82_2017_69
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