The Ebola epidemic that swept through Africa left 11,000 deaths in its wake, and now health experts and governments are using lessons learned from that crisis to fight the Zika virus in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“We saw Liberians were dying every day,” said Ebola survivor Naomi Tegbeh. “And you see people sick, and always when I talk about it, I still shed tears because these were horrible experiences and we don’t want Liberians to go back to those days.”

Ebola hit with a ferocity that experts don’t expect will return.

“Right now, in the three heavily affected countries of West Africa, there are response systems,” said Dr. Tom Frieden of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “I don’t think we’re going to see anything like the kind of terrible epidemic we saw over the past two years.”

Those countries now have laboratories, better hospitals and public health systems.

But the slow response from donor countries and the World Health Organization enabled Ebola to tear through West Africa. In contrast, the WHO already has labeled Zika an international emergency because of its link to birth defects.

Prevention, vaccination, funding

Experts, however, say more needs to be done. 

“We need to build the systems around the world to find things when they first emerge, to stop them rapidly, and to prevent them whenever that’s possible,” Frieden said.

Large pharmaceutical companies worked cooperatively to produce Ebola vaccines. These companies say they need to be consulted sooner when a health crisis strikes.

“We are necessary,” said Dr. Julie Gerberding, president of Merck. Nongovernmental organizations “cannot develop vaccines and manufacture them to the kind of scale that we need.”

Drug companies are ready to start working on a Zika vaccine, and experts from the U.S. and other countries are working in Latin America to help find the cause of the virus’s alarming link to birth defects.

But funding is also critical, not just for Zika or Ebola, but to combat any virus.

“We really do have to make sure that the world is safe because the next time we may not be so fortunate as to have something we can contain,” said Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University. “We might have a novel influenza that will literally sweep the world and cause millions of deaths in its wake, and we can’t allow that to happen.”
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