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The Ebola Story

Claudia Hammond looks back at the Ebola epidemic and asks how and why a small outbreak of the virus in a small village in south-eastern Guinea spiralled out of control.

Claudia Hammond looks back at the Ebola epidemic and asks how and why a small outbreak of the virus in a small village in south-eastern Guinea spiralled out of control, triggering a humanitarian crisis. With a death toll in the thousands, and still growing, the virus is pushing some of the world’s most fragile health systems to breaking point, decimating whole communities and forcing people to change the way they live and grieve.

So how far have we come in containing the epidemic and how can we prevent it happening again? Claudia puts her questions to Jeremy Farrar, director of the global medical foundation the Wellcome Trust and Kenyan doctor Esther Wanjiru, who worked for Medecins Sans Frontieres in Sierra Leone when the government announced a state of emergency there.

Photo credit: Ebola epidemic: Getty Images

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50 minutes

Last on

Sun 28 Dec 2014 14:05GMT

Broadcast

  • Sun 28 Dec 2014 14:05GMT

Podcast