There are calls for countries such as Australia to start planning early intervention measures to better deal with epidemics such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa during 2014 and 2015.
In November, the World Health Organisation declared that Sierra Leone had beaten an 18-month outbreak of Ebola disease that has killed almost 4,000 of its people and plunged the economy into severe recession.
The epidemic infected 28,600 people across the three hardest hit west African nations – Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone – and has claimed at least 11,300 lives since December 2013.
Sydney-based UNICEF worker Olivia Wellesley-Cole said her time spent helping children in Sierra Leone this year showed how important early intervention by the international community would be in the face of another epidemic.
Ms Wellesley-Cole spent time in Sierra Leone as a district child protection co-ordinator, and said in her area alone, there were 11,000 children who had lost one or both parents.
She said countries like Australia are going to have to deal with the problem better if there is another outbreak.
“[That includes] looking at what can be done to prevent or at least respond better to any future outbreaks, because the fact that Ebola is no longer in Sierra Leone doesn’t mean it is not going to come back,” she said.
She said whilst there were support systems, including child welfare committees within villages, countries such as Australia still need to help.
“Even for the children who were orphaned, they were not necessarily left alone, because it is quite typical in Africa, very much in Sierra Leone, [that] communities will take care of children, but those communities need help,” she said.
Differentiate Ebola from other diseases like malaria, experts say
Ms Wellesley-Cole said one of the difficulties she and other workers encountered fighting the Ebola virus was differentiating it from other diseases such as malaria.
“I think if Australia and other developed countries can put innovation into vaccines for diseases such as Ebola, that would be great,” she said.
“I think one of the challenges is to also come out with vaccines for other diseases such as malaria, as it has similar symptoms initially to Ebola.”
Ms Wellesley-Cole said she saw patients eventually being treated for malaria, and they would go home and find all their possessions burnt as a precaution against Ebola.
The head of the Centre for Biomedical Research at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne, Professor James Beeson also said there are a number of diseases that initially present the same way as Ebola, leading to some confusion during epidemics.
“It highlights how important it is to develop vaccines for Ebola and malaria,” he said.
“Outbreaks like Ebola interrupt the whole malaria control program.”
Earlier this year, the Burnet Institute announced it was a step closer to developing a vaccine for malaria, with the discovery of the mechanism’s the body’s immune system uses to fight it.
Professor Beeson said the issue was complex, with clinical trials for a malaria vaccine still years away.
He said malaria remains one of the biggest killers of children globally.
“We are working with a number of groups internationally and within Australia,” he said.
“It really requires a collective effort.
“Epidemics like Ebola and other things that we have had in the past, like SARS, also highlight a lot of goodwill across the planet to respond to these sorts of humanitarian disasters in the short term.
“We have got to try and strengthen that commitment for the long term.”