Type | Independent Business |
---|---|
Founded | 2008 |
Founder | Nathan Wolfe |
Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
Key people | Nita Madhav (CEO) Edward Rubin (Chief Scientific Officer) |
Number of employees | 51-200 [1] |
Website | metabiota.com |
Metabiota is a San Francisco startup that compiles data from around the world to predict disease outbreaks. [2] The company is a partner with USAID's PREDICT and PREVENT programs. [3] [4] In the early months of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, Metabiota and BlueDot independently demonstrated the capabilities of computer analytics to map the future spread of the virus between countries. [5] [6]
In an effort to expand its business offerings, Metabiota teamed up with insurance groups Marsh, African Risk Capacity and Munich Re to provide data for outbreak coverage. [7] [8] Coverage would pay out to governments or companies based on stages of severity of an outbreak to help pay the cost to respond.
Google invested $1 million into the company while also planning to act as a partner to provide expertise in data analysis. [9] Hunter Biden's Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners was reported to have a 13.4% stake in the company in 2014. [10] This investment and Metabiota's work with Black & Veatch at labs in Ukraine led to the company being flagged in Russia's bioweapons claims during its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. [11]
The company had staff stationed in Kenema supporting the Sierra Leone government when the Western African Ebola virus epidemic began. Médecins Sans Frontières criticized the company for failing to discover early cases, and for not sharing data or contact tracing information. Metabiota responded, saying they were restricted to reporting only to the local government. [12] [13] [14]
Médecins du monde, or Doctors of the World, is an international humanitarian organization which seeks to provide emergency and long-term medical care to the world's most vulnerable people. It also advocates for an end to health inequities.
HealthMap is a freely accessible, automated electronic information system for monitoring, organizing, and visualizing reports of global disease outbreaks according to geography, time, and infectious disease agent. In operation since September 2006, and created by John Brownstein, PhD and Clark Freifeld, PhD, HealthMap acquires data from a variety of freely available electronic media sources to obtain a comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases.
Guinea faces a number of ongoing health challenges.
The 2013–2016 epidemic of Ebola virus disease, centered in Western Africa, was the most widespread outbreak of the disease in history. It caused major loss of life and socioeconomic disruption in the region, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The first cases were recorded in Guinea in December 2013; later, the disease spread to neighbouring Liberia and Sierra Leone, with minor outbreaks occurring in Nigeria and Mali. Secondary infections of medical workers occurred in the United States and Spain. In addition, isolated cases were recorded in Senegal, the United Kingdom and Italy. The number of cases peaked in October 2014 and then began to decline gradually, following the commitment of substantial international resources.
Sheik Umar Khan was the chief Sierra Leonean doctor attempting to curb the country's Ebola outbreak in 2014.
An Ebola virus epidemic in Sierra Leone occurred in 2014, along with the neighbouring countries of Guinea and Liberia. At the time it was discovered, it was thought that Ebola virus was not endemic to Sierra Leone or to the West African region and that the epidemic represented the first time the virus was discovered there. However, US researchers pointed to lab samples used for Lassa fever testing to suggest that Ebola had been in Sierra Leone as early as 2006.
An epidemic of Ebola virus disease in Guinea from 2013 to 2016 represents the first ever outbreak of Ebola in a West African country. Previous outbreaks have been confined to several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
An epidemic of Ebola virus disease occurred in Liberia from 2014 to 2015, along with the neighbouring countries of Guinea and Sierra Leone. The first cases of virus were reported by late March 2014. The Ebola virus, a biosafety level four pathogen, is an RNA virus discovered in 1976.
Organizations from around the world responded to the West African Ebola virus epidemic. In July 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) convened an emergency meeting with health ministers from eleven countries and announced collaboration on a strategy to co-ordinate technical support to combat the epidemic. In August, they declared the outbreak an international public health emergency and published a roadmap to guide and coordinate the international response to the outbreak, aiming to stop ongoing Ebola transmission worldwide within 6–9 months. In September, the United Nations Security Council declared the Ebola virus outbreak in the West Africa subregion a "threat to international peace and security" and unanimously adopted a resolution urging UN member states to provide more resources to fight the outbreak; the WHO stated that the cost for combating the epidemic will be a minimum of $1 billion.
This article covers the timeline of the 2014 Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa and its outbreaks elsewhere. Flag icons denote the first announcements of confirmed cases by the respective nation-states, their first deaths, and their first secondary transmissions, as well as relevant sessions and announcements of agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders; medical evacuations, visa restrictions, border closures, quarantines, court rulings, and possible cases of zoonosis are also included.
Ebola virus disease in Mali occurred in October 2014, leading to concern about the possibility of an outbreak of Ebola in Mali. A child was brought from Guinea and died in the northwestern city of Kayes. Mali contact traced over 100 people who had contact with the child; tracing was completed in mid-November with no further cases discovered. In November, a second unrelated outbreak occurred in Mali's capital city, Bamako. Several people at a clinic are thought to have been infected by a man traveling from Guinea. On January 18, Mali was declared Ebola-free after 42 days with no new cases. There had been a cumulative total of eight cases with six deaths.
The following lists events that happened during 2014 in Sierra Leone.
In March 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a major Ebola outbreak in Guinea, a western African nation, the disease then rapidly spread to the neighboring countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone with smaller outbreaks occurring in Senegal, Nigeria, and Mali; the resulting West African Ebola virus epidemic is the largest Ebola outbreak ever documented.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) is a foundation that takes donations from public, private, philanthropic, and civil society organisations, to finance independent research projects to develop vaccines against emerging infectious diseases (EID).
Salomé Karwah was a Liberian nurse who was named co-Person of the Year by Time magazine in 2014 for her efforts to combat the West African Ebola virus epidemic. She appeared on the cover of Time in December 2014 with other health care workers and colleagues working to end the epidemic. Karwah survived ebola herself, before returning to work with Médecins Sans Frontières to help other patients afflicted with the disease. The actions of Karwah and other health care professionals are believed to have saved lives of thousands. However, two years later, Karwah died from complications of childbirth; her widower suggested that this might have been due to the widespread, mistaken belief that ebola survivors can still transmit the virus. Even before the ebola outbreak, Liberia had one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world.
Javid Abdelmoneim is a British-born physician and television presenter. He is best known for his work with Médecins Sans Frontières which has seen him respond to crises in Iraq (2009), Haiti (2010), South Sudan (2014), Sierra Leone (2014), Syria (2017–2018) and also aboard the Aquarius (2016), a search and rescue ship run in partnership between MSF and SOS Mediteranée. Most recently, Abdelmoneim served as a Member of the Board of Trustees (2015–2021) and was also elected the youngest serving president and chair of the Board (2017–2021) for MSF UK.
The 2018 Équateur province Ebola outbreak occurred in the north-west of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from May to July 2018. It was contained entirely within Équateur province, and was the first time that vaccination with the rVSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine had been attempted in the early stages of an Ebola outbreak, with a total of 3,481 people vaccinated. It was the ninth recorded Ebola outbreak in the DRC.
This is a bibliography of the Ebola virus disease, also known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, a viral hemorrhagic fever of humans and other primates caused by ebolaviruses.
Nahid Bhadelia is an American infectious-diseases physician, founding director of Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research (CEID) at Boston University and an associate professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. She served as the Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID-19 Response on the White House COVID-19 Response Team.
Ebola-chan is an Internet meme depicting a moe anthropomorphization of the Ebola virus and was popularized on 4chan. The first known image of Ebola-chan began on the Japanese social media site, Pixiv, in 2014. A few days after, it was posted 4chan's /pol/ thread, who began posting messages praising Ebola-chan. Soon after, 4chan users began spreading the meme to Nairaland, the largest online message board in Nigeria, accompanying images of Ebola-chan with racist messages and associated conspiracy theories. This included claims that Ebola was CIA-made and that white people were performing rituals for Ebola to spread. The meme's spread has been considered racist and has been attributed to increased mistrust between West Africans and medical professionals.