Researchers recently used World Health Organization (WHO) statistics on the current Ebola outbreak to estimate just how many additional infections would occur by the end of September. They found that an estimated 6,800 new cases are likely to occur, raising the question "what is making this outbreak so bad?"
According to a study recently published in the journal PLOS Current Outbreaks, when Liberia and Guinea implemented mass quarantine in August, the reproduction number for Ebola cases actually rose significantly rather than fell. This suggests that the quarantines were not actually good ideas, or if they were, they were so poorly launched that they exacerbated the problem.
Reproduction numbers represent the average number of secondary cases that a single case of infection generates in an outbreak. Simple reason dictates that when efforts to control and contain the spread of a disease are taken - as long as the disease does not become more infectious - its number should fall.
However, the researchers' analysis found that that wasn't the case.
"There may be other reasons for the worsening of the outbreak spread, including the possibility that the virus has become more transmissible, but it's also possible that the quarantine control efforts actually made the outbreak spread more quickly by crowding people together in unsanitary conditions," Arizona State University (ASU) researcher Sherry Towers explained in a recent statement. (Scroll to read on...)
And according to the latest WHO data, the Ebola virus strains sweeping through West Africa do not appear to have mutated in such a way that it would help them spread.
Instead, the researchers are suggesting that botched, unprepared, and simply ignorant efforts to help contain, prevent, and even treat the deadly disease did more harm than good.
And that's not exactly a unheard-of concept. Earlier this year, the WHO concluded that the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) epidemic that had swept through Saudi Arabia had indeed not become more contagious, but had simply been spread through rampant hospital negligence.
The far more deadly Ebola outbreak affecting West Africa is no different.
"No licensed vaccine or specific treatment for the disease is currently available. This leaves improved hygiene, quarantine, isolation and social distancing as the only potential interventions," said Carlos Castillo-Chavez, the director of the ASU's Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center.
According to the team's numbers and projections, "improved control measures must be put into place."
Thankfully, the good ol' USA seems to very aware of this. On Sept. 16, President Barack Obama announced that 3,000 US troops and medical personnel would be sent to the region to help control the outbreak - a move the researchers openly support.