Ebola Outbreak in 2014 - Essay Example

"Ebola Outbreak in 2014" is a great example of a paper on the virus.
The Ebola virus is a regional health crisis, and not a global one. Although it has attracted the attention of the international community and necessitated an international response plan to prevent the virus from spreading further, it cannot be classified as a global health crisis. The virus has only affected West Africa, which has the highest number of reported deaths and cases since the outbreak.

Otherworld regions such as the United States and even African regions like Eastern Africa have only reported isolated cases of the virus (Perkins, 2014). To be classified as a global health crisis, the virus ought to have affected most continents and required a massive global effort to contain. A global health crisis involves a higher prevalence rate large-scale response plan that dwarfs the conditions associated with a regional health crisis.

In the 21st century, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), avian influenza, and the H1N1 virus outbreaks can be classified as global health crises because they affected large populations of people spread across continents and also required a well-coordinated and mammoth international response strategy to contain.

The Ebola virus has not even affected the whole of West Africa because the worst-hit countries are Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea, which have reported over 1,000 deaths (Doucleff, 2015). The rest of the affected countries, such as Nigeria, the United States, and Mali, have reported less than 20 deaths combined. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a global outbreak as a pandemic, which in essence affects multiple continents.  The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa does not qualify as a pandemic; it is simply a regional health crisis that has created panic in other world regions.