By Adam Studzinski

NORMAL – Time’s Person of the Year was on Illinois State University’s campus Wednesday to speak about her experiences as health promoter in Africa during the Ebola epidemic.

Ella Stryker worked for Doctors without Borders in Guinea and two other African countries for much of the past 18 months. Stryker had little doubt the outbreak could have been handled better.

“I think it’s well understood that this was a failure, not just of W.H.O. (World Health Organization), but of the global community,” said Stryker. “It’s a massive failure. I put this on the level of genocide in Rwanda, in terms of our inability to address a situation that could have been prevented.”

Stryker said they received a lot of pushback because many people did not understand they were there to help.

“In Guinea in particular, but in all three countries, there’s a lot of distrust between communities and their health systems, and communities and their governments,” said Stryker. “So we were really caught in that space of people being afraid to seek care.”

Stryker added it took a long time for most countries and organizations to realize how back the outbreak was, and by the time more help got to the area it had become an epidemic.

“The first lesson learned is that we have to have functional disease surveillance systems in place so that we don’t have epidemics like this, and a functional disease surveillance system cannot be built only within a healthcare facility,” said Stryker. “It has to be something where the community is also involved.”

Stryker hoped to make people understand this outbreak could have been prevented if the response was timelier.

Adam Studzinski can be reached at [email protected].