Nature
Volume 513 Number 7517 pp143-272 11 September 2014
http://www.nature.com/nature/current_issue.html

Nature | Editorial
Ebola: time to act
Governments and research organizations must mobilize to end the West African outbreak.
09 September 2014
After disproportionate media attention on Ebola’s negligible risk to people in Western and Asian countries, the focus seems at last to be shifting towards how to stop the outbreak in West Africa. The grim reality is that medical organizations are struggling: the flood of new cases far outpaces available beds and treatment centres. Many of those who are ill are not receiving the basic health care that could keep them alive.
The tragedy is that we know how to stop Ebola. Well-informed communities can reduce the main routes of spread by avoiding unprotected home-based care of infected people and by modifying traditional burial practices. Infection-control measures protect health-care workers. Together with rapid identification and isolation of ill people, and tracing and monitoring of their contacts for 21 days (the maximum incubation period of the disease), such measures have stopped Ebola outbreaks in the past.
But the dysfunctional health-care infrastructure of the three countries at the centre of the outbreak — Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, which are poor and struggling to emerge from years of war — is simply not up to the task. The nations need help, and urgently…

Make diagnostic centres a priority for Ebola crisis
Bottlenecks in testing samples for Ebola leave patients stranded for days in isolation wards and raise fears of seeking treatment, says J. Daniel Kelly.