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A global health catastrophe narrowly averted a world unprepared for the next great threat
In December 2013 a young boy in a tiny West African village contracted the deadly Ebola virus. The virus spread to his relatives, then to neighboring communities, then across international borders. The world's first urban Ebola outbreak quickly overwhelmed the global health system and threatened to kill millions.
In an increasingly interconnected world in which everyone is one or two flights away from New York or London or Beijing, even a localized epidemic can become a pandemic. Ebola's spread through West Africa to Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States sounded global alarms that the next killer outbreak is right around the corner-and that the world is woefully unprepared to combat a new deadly disease.
As the outbreak spread, West Africans raced to the epicenter, risking-some losing-their own lives to save their countries. Global health authorities were caught ill prepared to mobilize the kind of response necessary to staunch the spread. And politicians the world over acted in their own self-interest, rather than for the greater good.
From the poorest villages of rural West Africa to the Oval Office itself, Epidemic tells the story of a deadly virus that spun wildly out of control-and reveals the truth about how close the world came to a catastrophic global pandemic.
List of contents
Contents:
Cast of Characters
Preface
Introduction
1. Emile
2. A Mysterious Killer
3. Into the Fight
4. A Turning Point
5. Roaring Back
6. Death of a Hero
7. Lagos
8. The Samaritans
9. A Call for Help
10. 70-30
11. Darkest Days
12. Deployment
13. Dallas
14. The Ebola Czar
15. Panic and Quarantine
16. The Obama Phones
17. The Burial Teams
18. A Waning Tide
19. Medicine without Borders
20. The Next Outbreak
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the author
Reid Wilson is national correspondent at The Hill newspaper in Washington, D.C., where he covers politics, public policy, campaigns and elections. He is a former staff writer at The Washington Post and a former editor in chief of National Journal's The Hotline.
