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Ebola<\/a> is a frightening disease. It spreads from person to person through contact with bodily fluids, and symptoms include vomiting, diarrhoea and bleeding. It has an average fatality rate<\/a> of 50 per cent if left untreated. (Covid-19<\/a> has a crude fatality rate of 2.7 per cent.)<\/p>\n First detected in 1976 in a village near the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then known as Zaire), the disease is believed to have a zoonotic origin (probably fruit bats). But colonial extraction and chronic dispossession<\/a> in recently independent nations were also among the causes, as they contributed to a lack of preparedness for emerging epidemics.<\/p>\n There have been several Ebola outbreaks in both West and East Africa over recent years, often straining local health departments. But with nationwide public health funding, political stability, vaccine trials and intra-African co-operation, it\u2019s possible for a country to contain an outbreak of the disease and recover quickly from it.<\/p>\n When the Ugandan Health Ministry reported an Ebola case on 30 January this year \u2013 the country\u2019s eighth outbreak since 2000 \u2013 they were neither surprised nor unprepared. Patients were treated at Mulago National Referral Hospital and Mbale Regional Referral Hospital. Health officials worked with locally trained physicians and co-ordinated with other African doctors as well as some international non-profit organisations. More than two hundred people who had contact with Ebola sufferers were quarantined, and their cases followed up. On 3 February the Ugandan Health Ministry and the World Health Organisation began a clinical trial<\/a> for a vaccine targeting the Sudan variant of the Ebola virus. The lead researchers are from Makerere University and the Uganda Virus Research Institute.<\/p>\n Uganda declared the outbreak over on 26 April<\/a>. In total there had been fourteen reported cases, of whom four died and ten fully recovered. It was a public health victory which showed that Africans could co-operate to end an epidemic on their own terms.<\/p>\n The Trump administration\u2019s dissolution of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), reducing the organisation to fifteen staff and eliminating over 80 per cent of its programmes \u2013 including initiatives for the humanitarian response in Sudan<\/a> and HIV\/Aids medication<\/a> \u2013 has worsened health conditions for some of the most vulnerable populations in the world. In 2014, when a large Ebola outbreak<\/a> swept through West Africa, the US allocated $8.3 billion<\/a> for global health, including funds for maternal health, HIV\/Aids, malaria<\/a> and tuberculosis<\/a>. (To put that sum in context, the US Defense Department\u2019s discretionary budget for 2014 was $615 billion<\/a>.) But some public health initiatives in African are now managing without American funds. <\/p>\n \u2018It is necessary to examine the internal factors which make our continent so vulnerable to attack,\u2019 Kwame Nkrumah wrote in 1968, \u2018and particularly to look closely at the whole question of African unity. For this lies at the core of our problem.\u2019 In 2016, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a> was set up as \u2018a continental autonomous health agency of the African Union established to support public health initiatives\u2019.<\/p>\n Dr Jean Kaseya, the Africa CDC\u2019s director general, holds weekly press briefings online. As Dr Mosoka Fallah, the organisation\u2019s acting director for science and innovation, told Forbes Africa<\/em><\/a> last month, \u2018it\u2019s about getting to the community, hearing from them, making them a part of the co-creation of the messages.\u2019<\/p>\n More than anything, perhaps, it seems that African public health experts are trusting science. The US government could learn something from them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n