Ebola Freedom Day: Back To Where we were

By the time you read this post, EFD (Ebola Freedom Day) would have dawned in Sierra Leone. I was saying this to a friend the other day but he was quick to caution me. “Not so fast, my friend,” he warned. “Liberia had been down that road before, only to be yanked back into the realm of Ebola realism.”

My friend may be right, but probably not for the reasons that he thinks. His fear is that the practice of hand-washing would lapse to old ways once a state of (apparent) Ebola freedom had been reached.

There may be some grounds for his pessimism. Hand-washing is a habit that is very difficult to inculcate and even harder to sustain, as many mothers can attest. Washing hands after using the toilet for example, is something that many fail to do. Though this lapse in situational awareness seems more prevalent among males, it is not exclusive to that gender alone (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117956&page=1) although, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, maintaining good hand hygiene is the single most important thing we can do to reduce the spread of infectious diseases. With difficulty, that message eventually hit home in West Africa during our recent encounter with Ebola. There can be little doubt that that contributed in no small measure to controlling the epidemic.

Eighteen months on though, there are many other things that we know about Ebola that we didn’t know before. This Ebola outbreak has been remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is the first epidemic in history that has played out on the world stage in real time. And most of us, thank goodness, were able to resist the attempts by some in the awkward squad to mislead and confuse. Happily, during the course of the year our collective common sense kicked in and enabled us to benefit from the free online tutorials on Ebola's biology: Its etiology, the way it progresses, and the rapidity with which it kills. We are even beginning to learn that there could be ways of preventing it from taking hold in people at risk. We have also learned that sometimes, some affected individuals are able to recover from it. But we have also learned that others relapse and, that even among those who do not, the virus may persist and could, unknowingly, be transmitted to sexual partners, for example. 

Here is where the risks remain. But meanwhile, let us be thankful, celebrate and keep our fingers crossed.

Tell Fren Tru