In an article written for the New England Journal of Medicine, field researchers from Central Africa pointed to rapid development as fueling disease outbreaks, due to a growing need for a robust, matching health care infrastructure.
While on the whole, such growth has been beneficial to the region, every gain has its side effects. The authors of the report cited Ebola outbreak incidents between 2013 and 2016 in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, pointing to their large, urban and mobile populations which allowed the Ebola virus to spread rapidly and overwhelm underequipped and underfunded health care infrastructures. Those cases led to thousands of deaths — something the authors hope to prevent in Central Africa.
“Clearly, Central Africa is rapidly approaching a tipping point,” the authors wrote. “Africa’s economic development is a positive change that cannot and should not be stopped. At the same time, rapid economic and demographic transitions bring the challenges of emerging infectious disease outbreaks of increased frequency, size, and global impact.”
The authors said that Central Africa, especially in the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is experiencing the world’s fastest rate of urbanization. By 2030, they noted, half of Central Africa’s population could be living in cities. While this makes life easier in many ways, it also subjects more people to new and emerging infectious diseases, while reducing the time it takes for those infections to spread, and increases the difficulty of containing them. Building health care infrastructure is critical to preventing large Ebola and other outbreaks, in their estimation.
“Directed and sustained investment is urgently needed before ongoing demographic and economic changes conspire to cause major outbreaks of both national and international consequence,” the report stated.
The authors cited in this report represent 12 different organizations such as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).