NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Although Ebola has finally been contained in Liberia, there is much to learn from this latest outbreak. Health officials are taking heed of the valuable lessons gained from the successes, and more importantly, the failures, of this most recent epidemic.

This hot-button topic is being vetted among many of the top science and medical journals, the most recent, the Journal Lancet. A recent survey published in Lancet points to key issues that hampered Ebola efforts, namely a lack of infrastructure providing adequate healthcare services and the political commitment to ensure such services exist.

Basic public health systems, which include treatment facilities, laboratories, and surveillance systems are fundamental to controlling outbreaks of infectious disease. The lack of adequate healthcare systems allowed Ebola to spread faster and farther that it would have, had such systems been in place in countries such as Liberia.