EHLRA/R2HC [to 17 October 2015]
http://www.elrha.org/resource-hub/news/

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Ebola treatment beds prevented thousands of new cases and deaths
Published on 13/10/2015
R2HC-funded research by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, highlights the need for – and power of – research conducted during a humanitarian crisis.

In December 2013 the world’s largest epidemic of the Ebola virus broke out, affecting thousands of people in West Africa. New research by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine suggests that 57,000 Ebola cases were prevented up to February 2015 due to the introduction of treatment beds and estimate that 40,000 lives were saved in Sierra Leone.

This research, funded by ELRHA’s Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises (R2HC) programme, focused on the impact of beds due to limited available data on other control measures in some districts of Sierra Leone. The new research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, estimates – through mathematical modelling – that the introduction of treatment beds just one month earlier could have prevented an additional 12,5000 Ebola cases and almost halved the outbreak…