Epidemiological situation of Ebola virus disease in West Africa

Abstract

After Guinea reported an outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in March 2014, EVD spread to neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa. Since then, the EVD outbreak spread over a wide geographic area among these three countries, and became the largest EVD epidemic ever with unprecedented numbers of confirmed cases and fatalities. As of April 2015, one year past the start of the outbreak, transmission is still ongoing. And, while six other countries, including those outside of the African continent (the United Kingdom, Spain, and the United States), have reported EVD cases, the source of the infection all originated from Guinea, Sierra Leone, or Liberia. As for the pathogen, Ebola virus, the route of transmission and associated prevention measures are well known, and change in the virulence or transmissibility of the virus has not been confirmed. However, there are specific factors that likely contributed to the unprecedented magnitude of the current EVD outbreak. In addition to the limited and poor medical and public health infrastructure in the affected countries, implementing appropriate responses rapidly was challenging for these countries, whose medical community, the general public, and governments had never experienced EVD before.