Tracking the rise and fall of Ebola in Sierra Leone

Life is returning to normal in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, after the worst Ebola outbreak in history took 11,000 lives. International medical teams have packed up their bags and left. The world has shaken off its Ebola jitters, but now scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and colleagues from China and Sierra Leone are conducting a kind of extended postmortem, trying to figure out what happened.

After a painstaking process collecting and analyzing information sent from nearly every chiefdom in Sierra Leone ― districts comparable to U.S. counties ― a team of biostatisticians including Fred Hutch’s Dr. Betz Halloran and Dr. Yang Yang of the University of Florida has published a new study that shows how the Ebola virus tore a swath through that country like an invading army.

Their statistical analysis tracking the “transmission dynamics” of the outbreak provides an unprecedented level of detail that could yield clues for how to stop the next outbreak of this frightening disease, said Yang, who is also a Fred Hutch affiliate investigator.

see more at: http://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2016/03/study-tracks-ebola-sierra-leone.html