The BBC   by Hans Rosling                                                                    March 23, 2015
Interview with Swedish statistician and global health professor Hans Rosling who spent three months working as an epidemiologist in the Liberian Health Ministry helping to tackle the Ebola crisis.

                  Hans Rosling flanked by Maj Morris Hunh (China), to his right, and Gen Gary Volesky(U.S.) to his left

Excerpt from BBC interview:

The curve turned around because enough Ebola treatment units were built. Medecins Sans Frontieres ran the biggest. When that was not enough, Liberian doctors and nurses added the next treatment unit. But the race against time in September to provide treatment and isolation for all patients, when the epidemic curve climbed to 30, 40 and 50 patients per day, was won by the WHO.

 By the end of September, Dr Atai from Uganda opened the so-called Island Clinic which meant beds could be offered to all Ebola patients.The curve was curbed for four reasons:

sciencedirect.com - June 2014
Justin Stoler, Rawan al Dashti, Francis Anto, Julius N. Fobil, Gordon A. Awandare
doi:10.1016/j.actatropica.2014.02.017

CLICK HERE - Deconstructing “Malaria”: West Africa as the Next Front for Dengue Fever Surveillance and Control

Highlights

• Febrile illnesses are vastly overdiagnosed as malaria in many African settings.

• West Africa is emerging as a new front for dengue fever surveillance and control.

• Efficient health care utilization depends upon proper diagnosis of febrile illness.

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO by Nurith Aizenman                March 23, 2015

Recruiting and training new health workers is key, because experts warn that unless the health systems in West Africa are brought up to scratch, an epidemic on the scale of this one will happen again.

Unfortunately, building national health systems doesn't tend to attract a lot of love from international donors, says Erin Hohlfelder, who's been pushing for this kind of funding on behalf of the ONE Campaign, a global health advocacy group.

"It's certainly not as 'sexy' — quote unquote — as things like treatment for HIV or bed nets for malaria, which are very tangible and easy to understand."

She says at least for now, the international community does seem to get the importance of building up West Africa's health systems. The governments of the affected countries are preparing national plans to present at a meeting of the World Bank next month

TIME MAGAZINE  by Helen Regan                                March 23, 2015
(Scroll down for link to full MSF report.)

Paris-based Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has slammedthe international community’s slow response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, saying it cost thousands of lives that could otherwise have been saved.

A Doctors Without Borders (MSF), health worker in protective clothing carries a child suspected of having Ebola in the MSF treatment center on October 5, 2014 in Paynesville, Liberia.

The leading international medical charity released a report Monday coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the outbreak’s start. It said warnings that the disease’s spread was out of control were dismissed as alarmist and that early calls for help were ignored by local governments and the World Health Organization (WHO), reports Reuters.

“For the Ebola outbreak to spiral this far out of control required many institutions to fail. And they did, with tragic and avoidable consequences,” said MSF’s general director Christopher Stokes in the report.