Right now, we're facing the biggest Ebola outbreak we've ever seen in history.
More than 2,000 people have died and that's more than the total number of people who have
ever died from Ebola since the first recorded outbreak in 1976.
And the bulk of the deaths have happened within the last month, so things aren't getting better.
There are a couple of things that have helped this outbreak really spin out of control and
one is the fact that the response just wasn't fast enough.
It wasn't until August that the World Health Organization declared this a public health
emergency, and that was 5 months after the first international spread.
In the past, Ebola outbreaks tended to be in really rural, remote areas, and this time
it wound up in a border region in West Africa, where people might cross the border for work,
or they might cross to go to the market.
With that, you get international spread.
This is a region of Africa that's never seen Ebola, so they didn't have the awareness of
what this disease was in the population.
These are also regions of Africa that have some of the lowest literacy rates, so that
made mounting a public health information campaign all the more difficult.
And there was fear.
There was mistrust of health professionals.
People, in this part of the world, they're used to being cared for by their families
when they're sick in the home, and in this case they have to be ripped from their homes
and put into containment facilities.
And these are places that have some of the weakest and poorest health systems in the
world.
In some of the hospitals there are days when they just don't have gloves, gowns, and masks.
Because of this, there have been health care workers who have just walked off the job.
They don't want to put themselves at risk anymore, and I don't know if you can really
blame them.
In Liberia people are taking their family members to the hospitals, but being turned
away.
There are no free beds for Ebola treatment in the country right now.
So as a result, Ebola's going back into the community and spreading further.
We could look at this epidemic as a kind of warning that we need more robust global health
systems, especially in a world that's increasingly connected.
That's something that we don't have now, and that's one of the reasons why we've seen things
get so out of control in this outbreak.