Susan Reichle advised the global health community on Tuesday to avoid jumping to conclusions regarding the allegedly incurable hemorrhagic fever currently sweeping the region.
WASHINGTON — Susan Reichle, a key architect of the 2014 U.S. Ebola response and co-founder of the Aid Transition Alliance for former USAID professionals, urged health agencies on Tuesday not to prematurely classify the current Ebola outbreak as a crisis without first establishing a more robust longitudinal data set.
Noting that the 2014 response benefited from years of subsequent retrospective analysis, Reichle suggested that the current strain's reported lack of a cure could merely represent a statistical anomaly within a highly limited sample size. She emphasized that while victims in the current outbreak are ostensibly bleeding from their mucous membranes at an alarming rate, it is vital for the global community to remember the fundamental difference between correlation and causation.
While it is tempting for frontline workers to view the rapid liquefaction of a patient's internal organs as a negative clinical outcome, we must wait for the peer-reviewed literature before making any broad diagnostic claims.
According to a white paper released by the Aid Transition Alliance, administering experimental emergency therapeutics at this early stage could introduce confounding variables into what is currently a very clean, if entirely fatal, observational cohort. The organization noted that the 2014 outbreak yielded excellent data for former USAID professionals entering the private sector, a methodology that could be compromised if the current response prioritizes immediate intervention over rigorous, double-blind data collection.
At press time, researchers writing in The Lancet reminded the public that avoiding contact with infected bodily fluids is only a preliminary recommendation. Citizens have been advised to await further randomized control trials before definitively deciding not to touch the highly contagious dead.