Preparing Germany for Ebola

Deutsche Welle: Is Germany actually prepared for the first infected patients to arrive here?

Lars Schaade: Yes, I think we are prepared, because we have a quite robust healthcare system. We have a public health service that's also quite robust. We have specialized treatment centers for highly contagious diseases. And we have already released all the recommendations that have to be followed if a case is suspected.

What about the Ebola virus itself? Is it a virus that is very hard to fight, if you compare it to other viruses, like HIV or influenza, for example?

It has of course high virulence, as we call it. So if you have contracted the virus, the [illness] is quite severe, and a lot of people get sick. But it's not transmitted by air. This, I think, is very important. It's just transmitted by direct contact. But if you have a direct contact with bodily fluids, for example blood, a few viruses - let's say about ten viruses - are enough to trigger an infection.

If someone contracts Ebola infection, it takes something like 10 to 20 days till the first symptoms actually appear. Is that person already infectious during that time period?

No, you're not infectious if you have no symptoms. So the infectiousness starts with the beginning of the symptoms. And this is quite fortunate for us, so we can detect and identify infectious people.

So that makes it actually a lot easier to stop the epidemic?

One should think so, yes. That's a classic way you can stop an epidemic, and it has worked for 40 years in the past. But the current epidemic is a little bit more complicated because of the high density [of people] in this region, and the high mobility in the region. And the people, or rather the system, has never faced Ebola before, so they don't have a lot of knowledge.

Right now we have more than 5,000 infected people. How many more are still to come, would you estimate?

It's hard to say. The World Health Organization calculates 20,000. There are some researchers who say it may be 20,000 each month for the coming months. So it will be more than we have now, and it will be above 20,000, that's my guess. But nobody can really say how many infected people we will have, in the end.

How fast do we have to react now, in order to stop it? How much time is left?

We have to react fast, because we see that the people we count now were infected one or two weeks ago. So we are always a little bit behind. So we have to react very quickly to isolate the disease and the infectious people from the people who are still in good health. So we have to create these isolation centers so that the people have a place where they can go when they are ill.

So that might be even more important than developing a vaccine?

For the current moment, yes. For the acute reaction, it’s more important to establish these kinds of isolation centers. Over the long run, I think we should have a vaccine to finish the outbreak at the end.

Lars Schaade is Vice President of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany's leading research institute for infectious diseases in Berlin. Schaade worked as a medical doctor for Microbiology and Epidemiology at the University of Göttingen and at the department for infectious diseases, AIDS and epidemiological hygiene at the German Health Ministry.