2014 and 2015 Ebola Breakout Essay

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Ebola Intelligence

The author of this report has been tasked with garnering and collecting business intelligence as it pertains to the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa. Countries that will be of particular focus will include Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. As part of the process and results of this report, there will be a location and collection of the data, and analysis of the data using techniques and software of the author's choice and a presentation of the overall results. One figure and presentation in particular will be a map of the affected region. While the region is certainly not out of the woods, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa would seem to be mostly under control at this time but the overall threat of a further outbreak still remains.

Analysis

Given that travelling to West Africa would be cost-prohibitive and dangerous, the author of this report shall rely on established and trustworthy sources of data as it relates to the West Africa Ebola outbreak. The sources used will be limited to peer-reviewed and other academic journals. These journal excerpts will be gleaned from academic search engine EBSCOHost and will be summarized and analyzed within the text of this report. Analysis not completed within the reports themselves will be done via the use of Excel and other basic mathematical structures given that the raw figures and data involved is not all that complex and robust. It would come down more to method rather than what is being measured. So long as the data collectors are counting properly and they are using trustworthy sources, there should not be a major issue in terms of the author of this report analyzing the data. There will first be a geographical analysis of the area using the map in the appendix. As for the rest of the data, both qualitative and quantitative information mundane to the outbreak and what needs to be known will be included in what is offered in this report. The author will use data sets and charts from the sources. Some of the tables and figures will be from the sources themselves but one of them will be of the user's creation using Microsoft Excel.

Per the appendix of this report, the countries in question are along the coast of Africa on the western side. The area is due south of Spain and Portugal and exists on the southern edge of the large block of land that juts westward from the main north/south strip of land that makes up the African continent. The three main countries in question all border each other. From northwest to southeast, the countries are Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. All three of them have at least some coastline along the Atlantic Ocean. Guinea is by far the largest and Sierra Leone is the smallest. Guinea wraps most of the way around Sierra Leone and borders both Sierra Leone and Liberia. Countries that border these three include Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Cote d'Ivoire (The Ivory Coast). Otherwise, the area in question is bordered completely by ocean. Location-wise, the area is fairly distant from other major areas of the world including Western Europe, the Middle East and so forth. The eastern tip of South America (part of Brazil) is the closest that the Americas come to the western tip of Africa (Google Maps, 2015).

The outbreak of Ebola in Guiney was declared by the Ministry of Health on March 21st, 2014. At that time, about 49 cases were known about the fatality rate from that pool was nearly sixty percent. Overall, there were twenty tests sent to France and of those, fifteen were positive. That is a rate of seventy-five percent. There are apparently about five overall strains of the virus that exist. A similar outbreak happened in Liberia. As of March 30th of 2014, it was found that there were cases in Liberia. Sierra Leone flared up soon thereafter. In short order, there were 337 deaths and that was based on a fatality rate of sixty-four percent. This would point to an infection pool of about 526 persons. By comparison, the largest previous outbreak on record as of that time wa sin Uganda. In that case, there were 425 cases and 224 of those people died. That is a death rate of 53%. In short, the death rate in both outbreaks would seem to have been anywhere from half to a bit more than six in ten. The earliest outbreak or general case that was reported over the last generation occurred in Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and that was in 1994. That infection, caused by the Tai Forest virus, was the first instance of Ebola happening in a capital city (Dixon & Schafer, 2014).

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A bar chart provided by Dixon and Schafer (2014) shows the trends of the most recent outbreak, at least through June 2014. Starting in December 2013, there was one or two confirmed cases. About five more were found in late January 2014. Things really started to flare up in February 2014. About four to five new or possible cases were confirmed every week in February. In March, this sprang upward to anywhere from ten cases a week to thirty-five case. There was a bit of a lull in April and May in that the highest value was twenty cases a week except for the second week of April, which reflected about 32 cases. There was another sharp upward spike at the end of May that rose to nearly forty cases. However, the outbreak numbers then edged down again and were in the range of about twenty a week as of the middle of June 2014 (Dixon & Schafer, 2014).

As for the areas where the outbreaks occurring, it actually was not all over the countries in question and was instead in limited areas of each. In Guiney, the problem areas were the provinces of Boffa and Telmele, both near the Atlantic Coast. These two areas were not connected geographically to any other outbreaks but were somewhat close to the areas affected in Sierra Leone. There were also some inland outbreak in Guinea in the provinces of Djinaraye, Dabola, Kouroussa, Kissdougou, Gueckdou and Macenta. These provinces basically form a geographically straight line from the coast of Mail to the point at which Guinea borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia. Indeed, three of the provinces in Sierra Leone that were confirmed to have active cases were also connected to that geographical line just mentioned. Those area were Kenema and Kailhun. One of the three suspected or verified problem areas in Liberia complete that straight line and that would be the province of Lofa. Liberia also had verified cases in Montserrado and Marbibi, both of which are along the Atlantic Ocean. There were suspected cases in Nimba, which is a province that borders the Ivory Coast. It is near the north/south line mentioned earlier but is not directly connected. The one area not mentioned yet is in Sierra Leone. The Atlantic-bordering areas of Port Loko and Kambia were found to have cases. Basically, there are three spots along the Atlantic Ocean, one in each of the three major countries talked about in this report, and the north/south geographical arc that involves all three countries. The Liberian province of Nimba is the outlier in that it is not along the Atlantic Ocean and it is not geographically connected to the north/south Ebola arc, although it is not far from it. Countries that directly border the problem areas would include Mali and the Ivory Coast. Countries that are close by would include Guinea-Bassau and Senegal. All of the countries just mentioned directly border Guinea while the Ivory Coast also borders Liberia (Dixon & Schafer, 2014; Rainisch et al., 2015).

A difference source for this business intelligence treatise tabs Guinea as being the point of first infection with the latest Ebola outbreak and it has since been named the largest outbreak on record when it comes to Ebola. In addition to the three countries already covered when it comes to those with infections, there have apparently been infections in the neighboring countries of Senegal and Nigeria. Given the incubation period and the overall progress that the virus makes, it has been asserted that one main weapon in saving lives is catching the virus early and before it is in its advance stages (Enanoria et al., 2015; Siedner, Gostin, Cranmer & Kraemer, 2015). Should that occur, the virus is quite commonly lethal. In looking at the totality of the outbreak, that being from March 2014 to July 2015, Liberia in particular was hit very hard. While a total of fifteen different provinces had cases, the area that had the most (and it was not close) was Montserrado. The first case in that province came around the first of July in 2014 and shop up to just short of two thousand cases before topping out. Of the other fourteen provinces, the next highest one was Grand Cape Mount with about….....

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