Arima Yuzo, Shimada Tomoe
Infectious Disease Surveillance Center, National Institute of Infectious Diseases.
Uirusu. 2015;65(1):47-54. doi: 10.2222/jsv.65.47.
After Guinea reported an outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in March 2014, EVD spread to neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa. Since then, the EVD outbreak spread over a wide geographic area among these three countries, and became the largest EVD epidemic ever with unprecedented numbers of confirmed cases and fatalities. As of April 2015, one year past the start of the outbreak, transmission is still ongoing. And, while six other countries, including those outside of the African continent (the United Kingdom, Spain, and the United States), have reported EVD cases, the source of the infection all originated from Guinea, Sierra Leone, or Liberia. As for the pathogen, Ebola virus, the route of transmission and associated prevention measures are well known, and change in the virulence or transmissibility of the virus has not been confirmed. However, there are specific factors that likely contributed to the unprecedented magnitude of the current EVD outbreak. In addition to the limited and poor medical and public health infrastructure in the affected countries, implementing appropriate responses rapidly was challenging for these countries, whose medical community, the general public, and governments had never experienced EVD before.
2014年3月几内亚报告埃博拉病毒病（EVD）疫情后，EVD蔓延至西非邻国塞拉利昂和利比里亚。自那时起，EVD疫情在这三个国家的广大地理区域内传播，成为有史以来最大规模的EVD流行，确诊病例和死亡人数空前。截至2015年4月，疫情开始一年后，传播仍在继续。此外，包括非洲大陆以外国家（英国、西班牙和美国）在内的其他六个国家报告了EVD病例，但其感染源均来自几内亚、塞拉利昂或利比里亚。至于病原体埃博拉病毒，其传播途径及相关预防措施已为人熟知，且病毒的毒力或传播性未出现变化。然而，有一些特定因素可能导致了当前EVD疫情的空前规模。除了受灾国家医疗和公共卫生基础设施有限且薄弱外，对这些医疗界、公众和政府此前从未经历过EVD的国家而言，迅速采取适当应对措施也具有挑战性。
