> You do not have to be an expert in healthcare or infectious disease to contribute ideas for life-saving solutions.
While that might be true, I really doubt this is the sort of situation where smart amateurs are likely to do much good. Remember all the crazy ideas for halting the Deepwater Horizon spill? None of them went anywhere. It was smart engineers who devised the eventual procedure to cap the well.
> Together we share stories and inspiration from around the world.
I mean, sure that might make people feel better, but I'm struggling to see how it helps. Nobody has ever faced an Ebola outbreak remotely like this before. The small group of people who have ever dealt with Ebola are experts already, and presumably don't need a bespoke Grand Challenge to give their input.
> highlight the micro-challenges embedded in the larger Ebola epidemic
They are "micro" insofar as they are "marginally smaller than the whole problem" but "Strengthen Health Care Capacity" is such an enormous problem by itself it's sort of laughable to call it a "micro-challenge"!
Most of the ideas currently are "make PPEs less terrifying" and, while I agree that that's a great idea, right now they just need craptons more of them distributed to the healthcare workers who need them.
Other brilliant ideas include "what if fasting makes Ebola go away," "Can we just use 3D printers to print hospitals?" "What about an Ebola symptom-tracking app?"
You can't tell that if you don't try. Given the situation[1] people who are actively fighting Ebola in Africa need all the help they can get, in any form, even if that's brainpower from amateurs. Of course, it's a very advanced topic (medicine generally speaking is...) where anatomy, pharmacology, (molecular) biology come at play, no one can predict what people all over the world is able to come up with.
[1] The situation is that the Western World at government level doesn't really care about what happens in Africa. It's still too far and away (still). The scary thing is that there's not known and currently approved EbolaVirus treatment that we know off, except rehydration and symptomatic treatment.
I think this challenge has the potential to be useful. We launched a similar effort last week geared more as a hackathon [0], and we have some really interesting projects in the works. Even just simple visualization and analysis of the data hasn't really been done yet, but there are a lot of insights that can be pulled out [1, 2]. Similar civic hacking projects were launched during Hurricane Sandy, and some useful things came out of it [3].
This outbreak really is one of the greatest public health disasters of modern times. I encourage you to think about how you might help, beyond donating money.
I encourage you to think about how you might help, beyond donating money.
While thinking about this is a laudable idea, I encourage everyone to donate money first, right now, since odds are it's by far the most effective thing you will be able to do.
>While thinking about this is a laudable idea, I encourage everyone to donate money first, right now, since odds are it's by far the most effective thing you will be able to do.
I have donated money, but I now think this is distracting us from what is really needed. No amount of money poured into any NGO will allow us to get on top of this outbreak. Even with tens of billions of dollars a NGO like MSF is not going to be able to put in place the required treatment facilities needed, nor have the authority or ability to enforce an effective quarantine. We should be putting all our efforts into lobbying the US government into getting the required UN security council authority to act and activating the full scale mobilisation of the USA military. This is as about as serious as anything gets.
The obvious solution is this: the fruit bat seems to be the villain in the piece, providing a host and vector for Marburg and Ebola.
Two solutions: 1. some way to mass vaccinate/introduce fruit bats with genetic ability to stop passing on bad things to humans.
2. Kill all the fruit bats (but then don't eat them - that is provably what got us into this mess in the first place!)
Fruit bats are really interesting from a zoonosis perspective. They are common carriers of a wide range of viruses. It seems their immune system tends to not ever fully control viral infections so as they pick up new infections they never really lose them.
While the idea of killing them all is attractive, this is not really practical in a place like west Africa.
I will put in my idea. This outbreak will not be solved like past outbreaks. This needs to go to the UN security council to obtain authorisation to allow invasion and enforcement of strict quarantine across the outbreak and surrounding regions. Those countries with the ability (in practice mostly the USA) are going to need to move to full scale mobilisation of the military and maybe even conscription of the needed health care personnel (this might not be needed if we can get enough volunteers, but I suspect we will need to conscript). If this is done in the next couple of weeks then we might just be able to get on top of this outbreak before it gets too big.
Of course I expect none of this will occur until 2015 by which time it will be too late.
Won't happen, due to the "optics" of dooming regional populations (never mind compelling the unwilling to treat the infected). Horrible as Ebola is, and as bad as its spread will likely get, the areas requiring quarantine for effective results are still largely healthy (relatively speaking); guaranteeing their demise over the hope of survival won't be accepted by those needed to make it happen.
Just yesterday I had a conversation with someone lamenting how inhumane it was to enforce anything remotely resembling quarantine (say, refusing flights from a "hot" country) as being mean on an individual level, despite the statistical odds of an individual infection exploding into the demise of millions.
Hopefully this outbreak will, like most Ebola instances, burn itself out well before it goes outright pandemic. Prepare to self-quarantine if it doesn't; given what we saw in Dallas of late indicates governmental unwillingness to address such an outbreak in a realistic fashion.
>Won't happen, due to the "optics" of dooming regional populations (never mind compelling the unwilling to treat the infected).
I agree it won’t happen until too late. I think around January we will see total panic set in.
>Hopefully this outbreak will, like most Ebola instances, burn itself out well before it goes outright pandemic.
Past outbreaks have not burned themselves out - they were controlled by standard quarantine and hospitalization. Even this outbreak was being controlled until August when it overwhelmed the limited infection control measures in place. We need to stop pissing around and get serious - when you have an uncontrolled pandemic that is doubling in size every 20 days then you need to act big and act right now with everything you have at your disposal.
While I am strong believer that great ideas can change the world for the better, in this case we don't have time. What We need is strict quarantine and functioning hospitals. As the CDC has modelled, if we can get 70% of the patients into properly run hospitals then we can get on top of the outbreak - the corollary is that if we don't then we won't.
As the CDC has acted, nobody wants to actually lock down an infected area, clean it with appropriate HAZMAT gear, and "level 4" quarantine those exposed. We don't, so we won't.
>As the CDC has acted, nobody wants to actually lock down an infected area, clean it with appropriate HAZMAT gear, and "level 4" quarantine those exposed. We don't, so we won’t
We don’t even need to do this. All we need to do is get to R0 below 1. What this requires is 70% of patients are treated in properly functioning hospitals. Right now the hospitals in the affected area are totally overwhelmed so in practice no new cases are being treated at all.
Putting in place a functioning hospital system on the required scale is now beyond the resources of the countries affected, the WHO, and NGO’s like MSF. The only organisation with the resources and the ability is the US military (with some help from other countries). Every 3 week delay makes the problem twice as large so lets get going right now since full scale mobilisation is going to take months.
> Health care workers need new tools to win this fight.
Do they really, though?
It seems like what health care workers in West Africa need more than anything is money. Money to build the kind of hospitals and health care infrastructure that makes it possible for a country like the U.S. to clamp down on early cases before they become epidemics. A long-term investment over many decades.
I mean, I'm all for new ideas, but if the big problem is "not enough money" it seems like the easiest way to solve it would be with money, no?
An alerting system that was smart enough (or configurable enough) to alert the doctors that a patient had visited West Africa would have prevented unnecessary contact by 100+ people in Texas. Instead we are left blaming the broken communication system between the admitting nurse and the doctor.
What about making existing technologies cheaper so that the money they currently have stretches further? Tons of progress here with everything from cheap microscope lenses that can be attached to iphones to prosthetic limbs that can be 3d printed.
