2.27.2017

TED Prize 2017 winner Raj Panjabi Four difficult truths highlighted by the Ebola epidemic


2017 TED Prize winner Raj Panjabi
Four difficult truths highlighted by the Ebola epidemic (script)
Summary
The Ebola is a very serious infectious disease with fever, bleeding inside the dody, and it leads to death. Due to incubation period whcih is three weeks, it's difficult to know who is infected with. This is a zoonotic disease meaning that it can spread from animals to humans but touching dead body is also dangerous.
The speaker looks back at the Ebola epidemic. He was born in Liberia. Fortunately, he could attend medical school in America, in 1990. It's because of a civil war, though. He returned Liberia in 2005. In 2007, he founded the nonprofit: Last Mile Health to serve as a physician in rural areas. In 2014, the Ebola erupted in not only in a rural area of Guinea where a boy died of Ebola but also in wide areas of Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and other areas. He faced them and fought the Ebola disease with the government. Although in 2016, the Ebola was put no longer an international public health emergency, he said that we have to prepare for the next epidemic or other diseases.
From this his experience, he gave us four lessons. 1) We can't create areas which there aren't doctors. Placing them all area might be high cost though it's too expensive and too difficult to save patients after a disease epidemic. 2) You don't have the despair and fear to fight a disease. If you close doors, the epidemics doesn't solve. 3) Creating good health care community is important. Then people can learn about diseases. 4) In usual lifestyle, health care system should work.

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