Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center: A big-picture look at the world’s worst Ebola epidemic
Mary Engel, staff writer at Fred Hutch, discusses an analysis published in Nature on the 2013-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, writing, “An international effort to analyze the entire database of Ebola virus genomes from the 2013-2016 West African epidemic reveals insights into factors that sped or slowed the rampage and calls for using real-time sequencing and data-sharing to contain future viral disease outbreaks. … [T]he analysis found that the epidemic unfolded in small, overlapping outbreaks with surprisingly few infected travelers sparking new outbreaks elsewhere, each case representing a missed opportunity to break the transmission chain and end the epidemic sooner. … The analysis is the first to look at how Ebola spread, proliferated, and declined across all three countries most affected: Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia” (4/12).