WiRED Updates Ebola Training Program in Wake of Growing Epidemic
BY ALLISON KOZICHAROW, EDITED BY BERNICE BORN
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eports from West Africa are not good. “[The Ebola contagion is] even worse than we’d feared,” Tom Frieden, M.D., director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told multiple sources while on a fact-finding trip to West Africa this week.
The Ebola epidemic has killed more than 1,400 people in West Africa, and given WHO estimates, it could eventually afflict over 20,000 people. Ebola has spread from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone into Nigeria, according to recent updates from the CDC.
Amidst mounting concern and focus on Ebola around the world, WiRED International just updated its Ebola health education module. In addition to already offering an overview of the disease—its signs and symptoms, diagnoses and treatments—the module contains new information reflecting conditions now happening in West Africa and quizzes to reinforce the training material and help people remember critical details about Ebola.
Dr. Frieden explains on the CDC website: “The bottom line with Ebola is we know how to stop it: traditional public health. Find patients, isolate and care for them; find their contacts; educate people; and strictly follow infection control in hospitals. Do those things with meticulous care and Ebola goes away.”
But “traditional public health” does not exist in populations left behind. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa poses enormous challenges inherent in such underserved countries where ignorance and lack of health care hinder treatment and containment of disease. Through its Community Health Education Program, WiRED continues its purpose to eliminate health knowledge inequality by providing communities with the tools to drive their own health outcomes.
The Ebola module can be accessed and downloaded free at http://www.wiredhealthresources.net/mod-ebola.html.
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