Case Studies | Ebola returns to Guinea
Lessons in epidemic preparedness and response, including a conversation with Dr. Claire Standley from Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security
After a new outbreak of Ebola in Guinea, a coordinated and swift international response will be necessary to contain the highly infectious and deadly disease, as medical workers still grapple with Covid-19.
ISD research assistant Jonas Heering has more.
In mid-February, Guinea declared a new Ebola outbreak for the first time since 2016. The highly infectious and deadly virus has returned to West Africa at a time when Guinea’s healthcare workers are already occupied fighting Covid-19, in addition to measles and yellow fever outbreaks. At least five people have already died. Luckily, an Ebola vaccine is already available — the first 11,000 doses arrived in Guinea a little more than a week after the outbreak was first reported. Now, a swift, coordinated international response will be key to containing the spread of the disease.
Guinea has experience fighting Ebola. Between 2014 and 2016, the disease killed more than 11,000 people in Guinea and neighboring Sierra Leone and Libera. But this time, the outbreak coincides with the ongoing Covid-19 epidemic. While the country has only recorded around coronavirus 15,000 cases and less than 90 deaths — compared to the more than 500,000 deaths in the United States alone — fighting the pandemic nonetheless consumes time and resources from Guinea’s healthcare workers.
This new Ebola outbreak serves as yet another reminder of the need to strengthen global health diplomacy to coordinate international responses to infectious diseases in the future.
Several ISD publications shed light on this topic.
The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa left the global public health community scrambling to respond quickly to help those infected and stop the spread of the disease. In the case study, The 2014–2015 West Africa Ebola Outbreak: The Diplomacy of Response and Recovery in Guinea, Georgetown University professor Dr. Claire Standley examines the global response in West Africa, as well as efforts to build laboratory capacity in Guinea. Students using the case study will learn what lessons global health officials can draw from this previous experience.
Another case tackles the broader implications of global efforts to tackle infectious diseases. In Global Governance of Disease, Dr. Rebecca Katz, professor and director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown, traces the historical evolution of global disease governance structures from the first International Sanitary Conference in 1851 to the creation of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the ratification of the International Health Regulations (IHR) in 2005, and examines the global health diplomacy behind the decisions to declare Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC) in response to outbreaks of H1N1, Polio, Ebola, and Zika. The case study discusses the political and organizational challenges to creating an effective global response to recurring as well as new disease threats — which the WHO’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic further highlighted.
For the latest episode of ISD’s podcast, Diplomatic Immunity, we delved further into the topic of global health diplomacy by talking to one of the authors, Dr. Claire Standley, who is also a professor at the Center for Global Health Science and Security. In addition to talking about the case study and what lessons it holds for today, we talked discussed work seeks to bridge the gap between practitioners and academics, what defines effective global health diplomacy, as well as the implications of the new Ebola outbreak in Guinea.
Listen in full:
For those studying or teaching on global infectious diseases and health diplomacy, these materials can help readers to understand how international politics affect the fight of pandemics in an increasingly interconnected world, and how the international community has — and has not — responded to outbreaks of infectious disease.
Jonas Heering is a research assistant at ISD. He is also the Bunker graduate fellow in diplomacy, and a master’s student in the School of Foreign Service.
