In disaster relief terms, this is akin to what my team at USAID faced internationally when the Ebola outbreak exploded in July and August of 2014.
Since the outbreak exploded in August, researchers have vigorously debated how to set up Ebola drug and vaccine studies, with some advocating randomized controlled studies, in which one group of patients doesn't receive the drug, as the quickest way to get results.
But the same year his team discovered the triple-drug therapy, Montaner remembers, an HIV outbreak exploded in Vancouver with new cases "going through the roof".
The recent SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak exploded on an unsuspecting public and functionally paralyzed health care delivery systems in many countries.
It is concluded that insecticide spraying cannot be considered a prevention for outbreaks if it is applied once the outbreak explodes.
They blame weak health care systems and uncooperative populations in poor African nations still reeling from civil war in the 1990s for allowing the outbreak to explode.
Since then, the outbreak has exploded into an epidemic it has now sickened more than 13,000 and killed 5000 but the team, led by Pardis Sabeti and Stephen Gire at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been unable to import any new samples from Sierra Leone.
Thanks to population density, yellow fever outbreaks tend to explode when they reach urban areas.
The Hoping outbreak made Taiwan's epidemic explode from one or two cases a day to the third-worst in the world after China and Hong Kong.
But officials could in "no way" anticipate that the Southland infestation would explode into an outbreak that would exhaust the supply of sterile flies, Siddiqui said.
