Elizabethton native Jennifer Brooks recently returned from her third visit to West Africa working to fight the Ebola epidemic with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her work as an Emergency Management Specialist for Public Health involved setting up emergency operations centers (EOC) to help these countries detect, prevent and appropriately respond to future outbreaks on their own.
Though she spent three months of her work in the second most affected country of Sierra Leone, she said it wasn’t scary because they have excellent preparation and safety training. They know how the disease is transmitted and how it spreads and she said they are there to stop it.
When the Ebola crisis was first announced last year, Brooks, was asked to go with a border health team of experts to setup entry and exit screening at ports of entry, a requested service by the World Health Organization (WHO.) She said monitoring health was so strict everywhere she went that every time she entered or exited a restaurant or hotel, everyone had to wash their hands and have their temperatures taken.
“All kinds of precautions were set in place because basic public health actions are so important,” she said.
According to the CDC, the outbreak of Ebola in 2014 was the largest recorded in history, affecting numerous West African countries since the disease was identified in 1976.
On her second visits from January to March 2015 and most recently in October, she worked with a team in Freetown, Sierra Leone, setting up incident management systems in each country funded by gifts from the CDC. Brooks said these EOCs will help the Ministry of Health in the future to detect and respond to public health events of concern like devastation from flooding or outbreaks of cholera or malaria.
“It’s our goal, that while they will continue to have outbreaks, that they will be able to quickly respond and not have large outbreaks,” she said.
Thanks to the hard work of Brooks, numerous CDC teams and volunteer groups, Sierra Leone just received certification of having no more active Ebola transmissions from human to human, and she said Guinea would also soon be certified.
Since March 2014, 11,314 people have been reported to the CDC as having died from the disease in six countries. According to WHO, as of November 1, Sierra Leone had the second most reported deaths totaling 3,955, second to Liberia with 4,808, and followed by Guinea with 2,536. WHO attests that these numbers are underestimates and that the number of reported cases total over 28,607.
She said hundreds of non-governmental organizations have been operating within these countries prior to outbreaks like Doctors Without Borders, Samaritans Purse, Save the Children, American Red Cross and International Red Cross.
“If there were another Ebola outbreak, we would hope it would be very small,” said Brooks. “The countries now know how to prevent transmission, how to detect earlier and respond quickly. CDC is making longer term investments with capacity development in these countries, so while chances of another epidemic are not zero, the likelihood of keeping cases small is great.”
She said that having partners work directly with patients and by providing health communications teams in country that educate about how to report and prevent the disease have made a significant difference.
“A lot of that education is what has been needed in the past year,” she said.
Brooks said she anticipates her return to West Africa. She supervises a team to develop incident management systems for numerous countries, not just the three that were most affected by the Ebola epidemic, but also unaffected bordering at-risk countries as well.
“Part of CDC’s mission is to protect Americans from diseases,” she said. “We have such a stellar staff employed that work not only in Atlanta, but all over the world on things like Ebola. It’s a fascinating agency and one that I’ve been proud to work for over the last 27 years.”
She said that her son pointed out that being from the Volunteer State, of course she would travel to help.
“I want the people of Elizabethton to know that CDC is working to protect them and people across the US,” she said.