To Stop Ebola, Scientists Are Trying to Predict Its Next Target
As Congo’s deadly outbreak rages, two new tools show promise for the future
More than 2,000 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo since an Ebola outbreak was declared last August, the second largest such outbreak ever recorded. The number of such outbreaks has ballooned since the disease was discovered in 1976. One reason it’s been so difficult to control is that Ebola is hard to track.
Karin Huster, a nurse who worked with Doctors Without Borders on the front lines of the record-breaking Ebola outbreak of 2014–2016, says that medical professionals often lack the tools to know whether an outbreak is happening and contain it when it is. “We knew some of the signs, [but] we didn’t have the tools,” she tells OneZero.
But two new tools for identifying outbreaks could soon prevent those situations from taking place.
A team led by David Redding, PhD, and Kate Jones, PhD, professors at the Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research at University College London, created a computer model that predicts where Ebola outbreaks will most likely occur in the future, together with their magnitude and causes. Their model, described in a paper this month in Nature Communications, successfully predicted the…
