What Happened to Ebola?

Several months ago, the news erupted with concerns about a pending Ebola epidemic. I wrote a handful of blogs trying to understand the problem and predicted that we would be seeing much more Ebola by now. Of course, none of that has manifested. In fact, several times in the last few months, I've wondered to myself, how come all the media hype about Ebola has died down?

Perhaps it was much ado about nothing. But I don't think it was a bad thing. In the same way that prognosticating a disease course can be incredibly challenging, making predictions about the course of an outbreak is equally tough. Epidemiologists work off many assumptions, and when these variables are slightly off, these errors are greatly magnified in the predictions. For example, in the outbreak, we had no idea how many infected people were not presenting to care. We based the likelihood to infect or reproduction number (R naught) off historic data. We didn't know how effective our interventions would be in containing the outbreak. And as expected, the media honed in on the worst case scenario, which threatened a global pandemic of disease.

Thankfully, this did not happen. But the situation did have a number of consequences, some positive, some negative. It focused attention on the threat of emerging infectious diseases. As a result, money flowed into areas of health that needed it: infectious disease, epidemiology, international health care. The world opened its eyes to the needs and plights of third world countries. Hopefully, it reinforced the global nature of the world; there are no longer places of isolation, and we need to share our resources and help each other. However, the situation may have created a "cry wolf" effect. Next time this happens - and there's no doubt that it will - I hope responses will not be more sluggish because we got lucky this time.