Ebola: Preparedness and Response

A special issue of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease (ISSN 2414-6366). This special issue belongs to the section "Infectious Diseases".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 August 2021) | Viewed by 12096

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis, Yale School of Public Health, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Interests: mathematical modeling; evolution of infectious diseases; cost-effectiveness of public health interventions; evaluation of tools and strategies for disease control

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Guest Editor
Institute for Disease Modeling, Bellevue, Seattle, WA, USA
Interests: mathematical modeling of infectious disease; Ebola virus disease; risk communication and community engagement; behavior-focused interventions; social ecology of disease

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Ebola virus is recognized as one of the most aggressive pathogens that cause hemorrhagic fever in humans with an approximate fatality rate of 50%. Since its first known emergency in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1976, more than 25 outbreaks of Ebola virus have occurred across Africa, including in DRC, Sudan, Uganda, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. While most outbreaks have occurred in rural areas and been speculated to result from spillover, trends in human mobility have recently led to urban outbreaks, as was notably observed in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia during the West African outbreak between 2013 and 2016. With more than 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths, the West African outbreak of Ebola virus disease posed a major global health challenge. Despite the successful development of an effective vaccine following the West African outbreak, the weak health infrastructure, public distrust, and socio-political turmoils in many high-risk countries continue to hinder quick control of the disease. The world’s second-largest Ebola outbreak, prolonged for nearly two years in the eastern DRC and claiming more than 2000 lives, was declared to be over on 25 June 2020.

As Ebola continues to threaten health security globally and in resource-constrained African countries specifically, this Special Issue aims to showcase the crucial work that is being done to understand the epidemiology of Ebola, evaluate the effectiveness of preventative measures, and assess various control strategies. We specifically seek to highlight research providing insight into optimal and cost-effective preventative and control strategies that could be instrumental in resource-constrained settings. We invite manuscripts for this collection in the following areas: novel surveillance approaches; large-scale efforts at risk communication and community engagement; advances in national laboratory biosafety and biosecurity; viral ecology during recent outbreaks; advances in diagnosis and treatment for Ebola virus disease; spatial dissemination of Ebola virus due to human mobility; and population-level effectiveness of vaccination strategies. Manuscripts may take the form of unique case studies; lessons from the field; research articles on descriptive epidemiology; or research articles on population-level studies.

Dr. Abhishek Pandey
Dr. Laura Skirp
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Ebola virus disease;
  • cost effectiveness;
  • clinical management;
  • bio safety and bio security;
  • program evaluation;
  • evidence-based decision-making.

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

12 pages, 3358 KiB  
Article
Cross-Neutralisation of Novel Bombali Virus by Ebola Virus Antibodies and Convalescent Plasma Using an Optimised Pseudotype-Based Neutralisation Assay
by Emma M. Bentley, Samuel Richardson, Mariliza Derveni, Pramila Rijal, Alain R. Townsend, Jonathan L. Heeney, Giada Mattiuzzo and Edward Wright
Trop. Med. Infect. Dis. 2021, 6(3), 155; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/tropicalmed6030155 - 25 Aug 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3771
Abstract
Ebolaviruses continue to pose a significant outbreak threat, and while Ebola virus (EBOV)-specific vaccines and antivirals have been licensed, efforts to develop candidates offering broad species cross-protection are continuing. The use of pseudotyped virus in place of live virus is recognised as an [...] Read more.
Ebolaviruses continue to pose a significant outbreak threat, and while Ebola virus (EBOV)-specific vaccines and antivirals have been licensed, efforts to develop candidates offering broad species cross-protection are continuing. The use of pseudotyped virus in place of live virus is recognised as an alternative, safer, high-throughput platform to evaluate anti-ebolavirus antibodies towards their development, yet it requires optimisation. Here, we have shown that the target cell line impacts neutralisation assay results and cannot be selected purely based on permissiveness. In expanding the platform to incorporate each of the ebolavirus species envelope glycoprotein, allowing a comprehensive assessment of cross-neutralisation, we found that the recently discovered Bombali virus has a point mutation in the receptor-binding domain which prevents entry into a hamster cell line and, importantly, shows that this virus can be cross-neutralised by EBOV antibodies and convalescent plasma. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ebola: Preparedness and Response)
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22 pages, 1705 KiB  
Article
Analytical Estimation of Data-Motivated Time-Dependent Disease Transmission Rate: An Application to Ebola and Selected Public Health Problems
by Anuj Mubayi, Abhishek Pandey, Christine Brasic, Anamika Mubayi, Parijat Ghosh and Aditi Ghosh
Trop. Med. Infect. Dis. 2021, 6(3), 141; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/tropicalmed6030141 - 31 Jul 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 4330
Abstract
Obtaining reasonable estimates for transmission rates from observed data is a challenge when using mathematical models to study the dynamics of ?infectious? diseases, like Ebola. Most models assume the transmission rate of a contagion either does not vary over time or change in [...] Read more.
Obtaining reasonable estimates for transmission rates from observed data is a challenge when using mathematical models to study the dynamics of ?infectious? diseases, like Ebola. Most models assume the transmission rate of a contagion either does not vary over time or change in a fixed pre-determined adhoc ways. However, these rates do vary during an outbreak due to multitude of factors such as environmental conditions, social behaviors, and public-health interventions deployed to control the disease, which are in-part guided by changing size of an outbreak. We derive analytical estimates of time-dependent transmission rate for an epidemic in terms of either incidence or prevalence using a standard mathematical SIR-type epidemic model. We illustrate applicability of our method by applying data on various public health problems, including infectious diseases (Ebola, SARS, and Leishmaniasis) and social issues (obesity and alcohol drinking) to compute transmission rates over time. We show that time-dependent transmission rate estimates can have a large variation, depending on the type of available data and other epidemiological parameters. Time-dependent estimation of transmission rates captures the dynamics of the problem better and can be utilized to understand disease progression more accurately. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ebola: Preparedness and Response)
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20 pages, 1305 KiB  
Article
Mathematical Model of the Role of Asymptomatic Infection in Outbreaks of Some Emerging Pathogens
by Nourridine Siewe, Bradford Greening, Jr. and Nina H. Fefferman
Trop. Med. Infect. Dis. 2020, 5(4), 184; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/tropicalmed5040184 - 09 Dec 2020
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2614
Abstract
Preparation for outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases is often predicated on beliefs that we will be able to understand the epidemiological nature of an outbreak early into its inception. However, since many rare emerging diseases exhibit different epidemiological behaviors from outbreak to outbreak, [...] Read more.
Preparation for outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases is often predicated on beliefs that we will be able to understand the epidemiological nature of an outbreak early into its inception. However, since many rare emerging diseases exhibit different epidemiological behaviors from outbreak to outbreak, early and accurate estimation of the epidemiological situation may not be straightforward in all cases. Previous studies have proposed considering the role of active asymptomatic infections co-emerging and co-circulating as part of the process of emergence of a novel pathogen. Thus far, consideration of the role of asymptomatic infections in emerging disease dynamics have usually avoided considering some important sets of influences. In this paper, we present and analyze a mathematical model to explore the hypothetical scenario that some (re)emerging diseases may actually be able to maintain stable, endemic circulation successfully in an entirely asymptomatic state. We argue that an understanding of this potential mechanism for diversity in observed epidemiological dynamics may be of considerable importance in understanding and preparing for outbreaks of novel and/or emerging diseases. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ebola: Preparedness and Response)
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