Houston scientist hatches plan to prevent next Ebola
The State Department is funding his trips through Hotez’s year-long term, but beyond that the project’s financial support is unclear. Hotez, however, said he’ll continue working on the project after his term ends.
The proactive strategy seems appropriate following the recent disclosure that the World Health Organization held off on declaring an Ebola emergency because the action could have angered the countries involved.
Documents obtained by The Associated Press in March showed that top officials at the United Nation’s health agency were informed how dire the situation was despite their public claims that they had little information.
Hotez’s plan targets “countries of strategic importance,” potential allies against ISIS and the spread of disease.
“One reason people admire America is the power of our research institutions,” said Hotez, dean of Baylor’s National School of Tropical Medicine and director of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development. “People come from around the world to study at Harvard, Stanford, Baylor, but we haven’t exploited that advantage as much as we could. We need to put science diplomacy out there as part of U.S. foreign policy.”
Hotez thinks the ISIS-occupied territories are vulnerable to an infectious disease outbreak because they share the conditions that historically have preceded such events – poverty, conflict and human migration. Because of those post-war conditions in West Africa, he said, experts could have predicted last year’s Ebola outbreak.
They had two previous lessons from which to learn, said Hotez. In the 1970s, African sleeping sickness killed 500,000 people following war in Angola, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Then, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a leukemia-like disease known as leishmaniasis killed 100,000 people following civil war in the Sudan. A breakdown in the health care infrastructure and people fleeing conflict preceded the outbreaks, both caused by parasites.
The task is complicated by the uncertainty of what disease threat might emerge in North Africa and the Middle East, necessitating the capacity to produce numerous vaccines. Hotez said he worries most about leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, MERS, dengue fever and alkhurma hemorrhagic fever, diseases for which there are no licensed vaccines; and tuberculosis, for which the only vaccine, BCG, offers at best modest protection.
For other regional threats, polio, measles, rabies and hepatitis A and B, vaccines are available but underused. UNICEF is working to get them to refugees fleeing conflict.
via NorthEast Calling http://necalling.com/houston-scientist-hatches-plan-to-prevent-next-ebola-31886
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