WASH activities at two Ebola treatment units in Sierra Leone.

Purpose: The 2014 outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in West Africa was the largest in history. Starting in September 2014, International Medical Corps (IMC) operated five Ebola treatment units (ETUs) in Sierra Leone and Liberia. This paper explores how future infectious disease outbreak facilities in resource-limited settings can be planned, organized, and managed by analyzing data collected on water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and infection prevention control (IPC) protocols.

Academic Institutions' Critical Guidelines for Health Care Workers Who Deploy to West Africa for the Ebola Response and Future Crises.

The unprecedented Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak in West Africa, with its first cases documented in March 2014, has claimed the lives of thousands of people, and it has devastated the health care infrastructure and workforce in affected countries. Throughout this outbreak, there has been a critical lack of health care workers (HCW), including physicians, nurses, and other essential non-clinical staff, who have been needed, in most of the affected countries, to support the medical response to EVD, to attend to the health care needs of the population overall, and to be trained effectively in infection protection and control. This lack of sufficient and qualified HCW is due in large part to three factors: 1) limited HCW staff prior to the outbreak, 2) disproportionate illness and death among HCWs caused by EVD directly, and 3) valid concerns about personal safety among international HCWs who are considering responding to the affected areas.

Sign me up: rules of the road for humanitarian volunteers during the Ebola outbreak.

The current Ebola outbreak is the worst global public health emergency of our generation, and our global health care community must and will rise to serve those affected. Aid organizations participating in the Ebola response must carefully plan to carry out their responsibility to ensure the health, safety, and security of their responders. At the same time, individual health care workers and their employers must evaluate the ability of an aid organization to protect its workers in the complex environment of this unheralded Ebola outbreak.

Global emergency medicine: a review of the literature from 2011.

Objectives: The Global Emergency Medicine Literature Review (GEMLR) conducts an annual search of published and unpublished articles relevant to global emergency medicine (EM) to identify, review, and disseminate the most important research in this field to a wide audience of academics and practitioners.

Methods: This year, 7,924 articles written in seven languages were identified by our search. These articles were divided up among 20 reviewers for initial screening based on their relevance to the field of global EM.

International emergency medicine: a review of the literature from 2010.

The International Emergency Medicine (IEM) Literature Review aims to highlight and disseminate high-quality global EM research in the fields of EM development, disaster and humanitarian response, and emergency care in resource-limited settings. For this review, we conducted a Medline search for articles published between January 1 and December 31, 2010, using a set of international and EM search terms and a manual search of journals that have produced large numbers of IEM articles for past reviews. This search produced 6,936 articles, which were divided among 20 reviewers who screened them using established inclusion and exclusion criteria to select articles relevant to the field of IEM.