Technology and disease control: the Ebola outbreak and the need for modern medical infrastructure in the developing world

When author Richard Preston published his 1992 New York Times article about Ebola, “Crisis in the Hot Zone”, there had only been a handful of Ebola outbreaks since the disease’s discovery in the 1970s — but the ferocity of the virus made it an excellent subject for a non-fiction thriller. While the outbreaks in the 1970s until the mid-1990s produced high mortality rates and terrifying scenes of agony, they stayed contained in sub-Saharan Africa due to a swift international response and adequate health care.

Now, despite huge advancements in medical technology, Ebola has spread to create the biggest outbreak since its discovery with over 10,000 reported cases and likely thousands more unreported. According to NPR and the United Nations, the massive scale of the outbreak has wreaked havoc on West Africa’s healthcare infrastructure and has led to a new assessment of how to fight this modern-day plague using modern-day solutions.

Why now?

Before one can analyze new solutions to the problem, it must be understood why the old system of preparation failed and in the case of West Africa and Ebola it was a complete lack of preparation. Previously, Ebola had been completely contained, aside from laboratory accidents, to sub-Saharan Africa with the largest outbreaks occurring in the DR Congo, Uganda, and Gabon. The West African nations that are now affected by the virus have had no experience with Ebola and simply did not have the resources or the training to handle an outbreak and it naturally spread out of control. Sadly enough, many medical experts believe that the virus could have been contained with more beds, better local education, and proper hydration for the victims who were losing fluids but too weak to replenish them. Simply enough, inexperience with the disease made containing it a difficult task.

Read more: Tracking ebola: 8 internet resources to help keep abreast of the epidemic

How to stop Ebola?

Before the most recent outbreak, the number of cases in one outbreak had never exceeded 1,000, a fact thought to be due to the isolated nature of the villages where the outbreaks occurred, as opposed to the outbreaks that are now are taking place in densely populated urban areas. In a strange twist, the popular video game World of Warcraft experienced a faux-plague in 2005 called the “Corrupted Blood incident“, and while it may seem to some like an isolated event in a fake world, it caught the eye of infectious disease researchers who used it as a case study for both prevention and human reaction to an epidemic.

One thing learned was that mapping the spread of the disease is extremely important to identify risk, and the Huffington Post has published an article regarding exactly that entitled “How The Tech In Your Smartphone Could Help Fight The Next Ebola Outbreak“. Within the article, physicians detail how using one’s smartphone to track their individual movements helps to identify risks and make the quick decisions needed to contain such a highly infectious virus.

Even further, due to the mass adoption of electronic health records, healthcare providers can now use a patient’s travel history and reported symptoms to flag potential carriers electronically. For many, this may offend their sense of privacy yet in the face of a species-ending epidemic there may be some sensibilities that have to be let go of temporarily. Much has also been said about the potential utility of geo-thermal imaging technology, which could help identify citizens suffering from high fever.

Read more: Ebola Facts site sees massive traffic spike as epidemic spreads

A healthcare worker’s risk

In one of the more newsworthy components of the Ebola story, numerous American and European healthcare workers are traveling to West Africa to combat the outbreak and due to their inadequate safety measures, are returning home infected and exposing dozens of others to possible infection. Recently, Popular Science has actually posited that the only surefire way to prevent healthcare workers from becoming infected is to use robots to clean and sanitize the facilities, remove waste, and transport living and dead bodies. This would greatly reduce the risk involved in fighting Ebola and would eliminate the furor over whether or not healthcare workers returning from West Africa should be quarantined against their will.

Improved internet accessibility

Having improved internet availability wholesale throughout the continent would be an enormous step towards improving African healthcare infrastructure. There are major setbacks: not only the lack of private companies selling satellite internet service in Africa, but also the abject poverty which makes the internet prohibitively expensive to poor families in rural Africa. In contrast, in the United States, there are several private companies who service remote areas with satellite internet, but these options simply don’t exist for Africans.

There are, however, several companies are vying to bring Africa online (Facebook through its Connectivity initiative and Google through Project Loon), there are many obstacles toward bringing rural communities in Africa online. Google has accomplished bringing areas in Africa online through “white space” trials (which transmit wi-fi via unused frequencies in the old television broadcasting spectrum). Hopefully, these companies will continue to endeavor to help Africa (and other developing nations) get online.

Read more: IBM to launch mobile health-tracking initiative to track Ebola

Conclusions

The current epidemic represents the deadliest Ebola outbreak the world has yet seen, and the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization both predict a bitter struggle with thousands more dying before it is truly contained. While it is a terrible tragedy, it has created the discussion needed to re-evaluate how we fight diseases and prevent international epidemics. The solutions that are coming forth are both innovative and effective, and will give the medical community the tools it needs to fight future epidemics.

Image: European Commission DG ECHO via Flickr.