Lessons from Ebola: Improving infectious disease surveillance to inform outbreak management

Abstract

The current Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa has revealed serious shortcomings in national and international capacity to detect, monitor, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks as they occur. Recent advances in diagnostics, risk mapping, mathematical modeling, pathogen genome sequencing, phylogenetics, and phylogeography have the potential to improve substantially the quantity and quality of information available to guide the public health response to outbreaks of all kinds.