From his lab in Liverpool, Professor Tom Solomon is heading UK efforts to combat Ebola. He’s hopeful we’ll have a treatment and vaccine within a year. But that’s only the beginning of our worries…
Professor Tom Solomon was in the shower when he got a sinking feeling in his stomach. It was July 2014 and Radio 4’s Today programme was reporting on Ebola. As director of the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Infection and Global Health, he was already well acquainted with the outbreak, which had been first reported in March, in Guinea. But there had been outbreaks of Ebola every few years in Africa since the mid-70s, and they were normally brought under control fairly quickly. True, this outbreak looked bigger than on previous occasions – there had already been a few hundred deaths – but Solomon put this down to the fact that it was the first time Ebola had hit west rather than central Africa, and people were unprepared.
That morning, Solomon heard two things that gave him pause. First, the doctor who was leading the response in Sierra Leone, Sheik Humarr Khan, had caught Ebola himself; he later died. And second, for the first time, an airline passenger had unwittingly carried Ebola to a new country, Nigeria.
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