Ebola. Liberia -- Undercover: Inside the Battle to Bend the Curve of the Deadliest Ebola Epidemic in History Kindle Edition

This non-fiction narrative, completed on the 10-year anniversary of Liberia’s first Ebola-Free status declaration in May 2015, narrates the sequence of events that defined the core response to an Ebola outbreak that had ballooned, by mid-July 2014, into the deadliest Ebola epidemic in modern history. This gritty description of a critical six-month period of the outbreak/epidemic, borrows from accounts of over 70 front-line responders and references over 250 media articles of the time.Five years in the making, the book weaves together observations from both episodic participants and constant actors, ranging from the U.S. Ambassador in Liberia to ambulance team members threatened with bone-shattering beatings, treatment unit nurses on the verge of nervous breakdowns, a Glock-brandishing burial team guardian, and dozens more, to generate a taut exposé of the chaotic response at field level. The author, an international health sector procurement specialist himself, coincidentally arrived in Liberia on the same aircraft that carried the first MSF Medical Coordinator and the new facility manager for the largest Ebola Treatment Unit in history at that point and was soon tapped to be a second-line responder to the epidemic. From that perspective, he offers a few personal glimpses of the situation, which threatened to overwhelm not only Liberia, but -- on account of the historic ties of that country to America -- hop to the U.S.A. at a moment when the country had less than 20 bio-contained beds for such patients.Even though this is a dramatic narrative and not a public health primer, this work does provide students of Public Health Master's programs, as well as global health managers, with vivid working examples of strategies, policies and tactics that can be implemented during the “mitigation” phase of a viral outbreak to reduce transmission before vaccines are widely available for administration. Read more