With vaccine in hand, Ebola response teams are struggling to track those who need it
The #Ebola vaccine is only as good as responders' efforts to track down people who need it — and they are struggling to find them in time.
The Ebola response teams in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are having increasing trouble keeping track of where the virus is spreading, a problem that threatens containment efforts and undermines the effectiveness of the vaccination program there.
Public health officials had been hopeful that an experimental vaccine could help curb the spread of the outbreak. But, for that to happen, response teams must be able to identify people who have been in contact with Ebola patients. Persistent violence in the outbreak zone has made that hard to do.
More than half of the recently detected cases haven’t been on lists of contacts. And even retrospective detective work is failing to piece some of these people into the transmission chain, the
