The outbreak of Ebola is almost exhausted. This is
conspicuous evidence. In the last weeks, no new cases of infection, or very few
of them, have been recorded, although there is close monitoring of contacts
that could develop the disease, and these are great news.
But after the war we will have to handle the
"peace" and the war’s aftermath.
And that could be difficult. Historically, outbreaks of
Ebola, headline grabbers, have involved a small number of victims (318 people
in Zaire at 1976; 315 people in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) at 1995; 425
in Uganda 2000-2001, 149 in Uganda 2007, and 264 people in DRC at 2007, also)
with mortality rates above 50% (except in Uganda at 2007, which was 25%). Those
who survived were very few quantitatively, as those initially affected were not
very numerous.
But now we face a major challenge. More than 28,000 affected;
more than eleven thousand deaths. But what is also more important, no less than
17,000 people infected who recovered. These individuals require ongoing medicalcare to manage complications of the infection that may develop after recovery.
And here we have two examples of the "first" world.
On October the 9th, it was known that the British nurse Pauline Cafferkey, age 39, who had contracted the virus last December when she was working as a care-taker of the non-governmental organization Save the Children in Sierra Leone, had been isolated in a hospital at London after it was detected Ebolavirus again in an "unusual late complication related to their previous infection with the Ebola virus". Health authorities claim that it was a remnant of the disease and that there was no danger of contagion, no significant risk to public health. The nurse, however, was in critical condition before starting to recover.