Harvard Business Review: An Ebola Outbreak Has Just Been Stopped. Here’s What It Tells Us About Containing Epidemics.
Ranu S. Dhillon, instructor at Harvard Medical School and physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Devabhaktuni Srikrishna, founder of Patient Knowhow, discuss the response to and containment of the recent Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, writing, “Global agencies, on high alert after the West African epidemic, leveraged lessons learned and efforts made since then to respond differently in several important ways.” They add, “[A]lthough this outbreak shows that we can respond effectively, it also reveals several vulnerabilities that might get overlooked because things worked out in spite of them. … While we should celebrate the accomplishment and progress signified by the efficient containment of this Ebola outbreak, we should take note of the vulnerabilities that remain, and redouble our efforts to address them before the next epidemic” (7/13).