Ebola: 70-70-60.

On October 15th (15/10/14) the World Health Organisation (WHO) predicted that by the start of December there will be 10,000 new cases of Ebola in west Africa each week. So far there have only been 9000 cases of Ebola in total. If that grim prediction becomes true then the virus will completely overwhelm the already over-stretched healthcare systems in west Africa and it will become impossible to control Ebola's spread. That will have absolutely devastating effects on those Ebola affected nations because at that rate of infection the entire population of Sierra Leone will have been wiped out by Ebola in just 38 months.

To avoid this nightmare scenario the WHO predicts that within 60 days 70% of Ebola patients will have to be isolated in hospital and 70% of Ebola victims will have to have to be safely buried. There are currently 55 days left to meet that target.

The target of getting 70% of patients isolated in hospital is going to be particularly difficult because there simply aren't the hospitals to put them in. The international community led by the US has sent troops (some 4000 in America's case) to help build new hospitals and train people to staff them. However this strikes me as something of a futile exercise because 90% of Ebola patients will die of the disease. Plus for every 70 beds in one of these new hospitals an extra USD1million per month will have to be found to operate them. Therefore you have to question the logic of bringing Ebola patients into hospitals where they can infect other patients and staff which further weakens the nation's healthcare system making it harder for it to fight other killer diseases such as Measles, Malaria and Cholera.

So although it seems extremely heartless I think that the priority should be making sure that the Ebola dead are buried before they can infect others. After all at some point 9 out of every 10 Ebola patients will become one of the Ebola dead. At the moment Ebola affected nations operate an emergency service where corpse recovery teams will come out to people's homes in order to collect the bodies of people who have died of Ebola, disinfect the area and identify anybody who has come in contact with the deceased so they can be monitored for signs of infection. The problem is that these corpse recovery teams are badly underfunded and badly understaffed meaning that they can take days and even weeks to respond to call outs. During this time the corpses are often left lying in the street when they can infect many people.

Therefore it might be worth considering a neighbourhood based system to deal with the dead. This would involve dispatching body bags, disinfectant and protective equipment such as gloves, raincoats etc in bulk to key buildings such as a police station, school, Church, elder's home etc within a neighbourhood or village. Then when someone dies of Ebola their family or other people who have been caring for them can be issued with a kit that allows them to spray the body with disinfectant, place it in a sealed body bag and then spray the body bag itself with disinfectant. That will greatly reduce the chances of that corpse going on to infect other people while it is waiting to be removed for burial. As people would have to fill in a form to get the kit it would also help build up a picture of who has been in contact with Ebola so they can be monitored to avoid them further spreading the infection.

Anyway that's my off the top of my head contribution. Feel free to ignore it if it's stupid.

18:50 on 20/10/14 (UK date).