Description:

Mr. Tim Butcher
Best-Selling Author and Award-Winning Journalist

Host: Professor Matthew Glucksberg

Thursday, October 22nd
4:00-5:00PM, Tech L361
Reception to follow after each session
Willens Wing Atrium

Title:
“Ebola 2.0 – Lessons from the World’s Most Deadly Haemorrhagic Fever Outbreak”

Abstract:
The scale of the Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa is unprecedented both in the number of fatalities and the opportunities it created for the future fight against the disease.
Tim Butcher will tell the story of this ominous pathogen: from the time it was first identified by Belgian doctors in 1976 gingerly handling an ice flask of contaminated blood, to outbreaks in the Congo River basin in the 1990s that spawned gory thrillers picked up by Hollywood, to the unexpected jump that saw a child die of Ebola in Guinea 2,000 kms from previous outbreaks and how that child’s death spread across jungle borders into Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Tim will touch on the errors made by health practitioners and authorities in the handling of the current outbreak, suggest ways those errors can be avoided in the future and discuss opportunities for medicine going forward from the successful design of an Ebola vaccine to public health programmes to help contain future outbreaks.