Hindsight is 20-20 – it’s an old saying and never more true than when looking back at an epidemic. But sometimes looking backward can help people think more clearly when planning ahead.
Dr. Sabine Franklin, a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University, is an economist using her training to better understand public health.
She went to west Africa to talk to people about the Ebola epidemic (2014-2016) that killed 11,000 people, most of them in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Franklin wanted to see how communities responded during and after the epidemic, and what might be useful going forward.
In her ongoing research on outbreaks, she’s found that people don’t always apply lessons learned to diseases, like what we’ve seen in the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts are also failing to use what they already know in trying to respond to ever-worsening outbreaks of avian influenza.
Listen to this episode of One World, One Health as Dr. Franklin describes where she sees the world falling short, and how she thinks things could be turned around in time using the One Health approach to help us all better handle the next pandemic.