At a time the Ebola virus is fast spreading to other climes, with a recent case detected in Texas, it is apparent that Ebola is now a global disease. With over 3000 death recorded in West Africa alone, and as the number grows daily, there is the need for all to pull the necessary resources together in the eradication and spread of Ebola.

While global effort against Ebola continues, we must not forget that though no viable vaccine has been fully certified by global health bodies, the disease is controllable through what Tom Frieden of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls “rapid, focused interventions”.

The Ebola success story in Nigeria is worthy of mention here and with U.S officials taking a cue from the former in the hope of preventing the transmission of the virus in the U.S, after Thomas Eric Duncan was diagnosed with Ebola in Dallas, Ebola hopefully can be contained if extensive response is pursued.

To understand how Nigeria went around the Ebola conundrum, it is important to note, beyond the usual untenable arguments, that the on-going polio campaign the country in the last couple of years have engaged in contributed in many ways to the country’s success at impeding the virus. How viable is this fact? According to the Guardian, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was reported to have built in 2012 an emergency command centre to assess the presence of Polio in the region, an initiative which assisted Nigeria to proactively contain the Ebola spread. Since Patrick Sawyer’s diagnosis, Nigerian healthcare personnel, employing emergency operations, had confirmed 19 cases in addition to one probable case. By late September, health officials had identified 894 contacts with those cases and conducted 18,500 visits with those who had potentially been infected to check for Ebola symptoms. Since then, no new cases have been recorded.

read more<<<http://newsafricanow.com/letting-fight-end-polio/