A matter of months ago, Dr Marc Forget’s job, at the front line of the fight against the deadliest Ebola epidemic, was best summed up by two words: “damage control.” “The priority then was just to increase bed capacity and to provide safe burials,” he says. “We were just reacting to the magnitude of the disaster.”
Now, one year to the day since the World Health Organisation (WHO) – belatedly – declared the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a public health emergency of international concern, Dr Forget’s work with the aid charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is very different, but no less arduous.
Efforts to end the epidemic, which has killed more than 11,000 people, once and for all in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia now centre on a meticulous process, akin to detective work, of tracing, contacting and monitoring every single person who could possibly have contracted the virus.
“Now we are in what I hope will be the final sprint,” Dr Forget, MSF’s emergency co-ordinator in Guinea, said from the charity’s base in the capital Conakry. “But the strategy is complex. You have to go deep, deep into the details of who was in touch with who. If somebody had symptoms and he was on public transport, when was that? What kind of vehicle was it? Where are the suspected contacts now?”
