Contact Tracing: The Tracking of a killer
Once an Ebola case is confirmed, there are several steps that must occur to effectively control the spread of the disease among the human population. First, the infected person must be placed in isolation to break the chain of transmission. The next step is contact tracing in which all of the people who have had possible contact with the infected individual are identified, contacted, and then monitored to ensure they do not start to show symptoms of the disease. These contacts are monitored for 21 days, which is the incubation period for Ebola. If the contacts do not develop symptoms within this time period, they will not become sick with Ebola. It is important to remember how this outbreak started: from a single case of a two-year-old boy in Guinea. The disease spread from one small child to more than 14,000 people in less than a year. Most of the child's family became infected and also died; thousands of people have died as a result of the single Ebola case.
The two videos on the right and the document below explain contact tracing and chain of transmission in more detail. |
|