Scientific Collections vs. Pandemics: an unfair match?

Fig. 1. Ebola Signs and Symptoms.

Editor’s Note: SciColl held our first community workshop on Emerging Infectious Diseases in October 2014. This October we're posting several pieces that highlight the important work where collections continue to play an integral role.

Editor’s Note: SciColl intern, Ebubechi Okpalugo from Pembroke College, contributed this article as part of her time in the SciColl office during Summer 2017.

Sweeping across three countries and claiming over 11,000 lives, the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak is almost impossible to forget. First identified in 1976, in a remote village named Zaire in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, there have been multiple outbreaks of the virus since. But the 2014 pandemic, caused by the Zaire strain, has been the most deadly. Striking on the border of three of the poorest African nations, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, the virus spread to an unprecedented scale. Liberia, the worst hit, was not officially declared Ebola-free until the 13^th of January 2016.

Could it have been stopped quicker? That’s where scientific collections come in.

In the News: Collecting for Disasters

Fig.1. A planned biobank for samples from Ebola patients could bolster African science and aid in global health efforts (Credit: CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith, via PHIL)

How far would you go to collect? When it comes to studying a nuclear disaster, a deadly disease, or even unreachable plants, these scientists come up with clever ways to take samples. Such collections help in global health and environmental efforts that work to protect our world:

Report explores use of scientific collections in combating emerging infectious diseases

Editor's Note

The October 2014 workshop report can be seen here. For more information about SciColl, visit www.scicoll.org.

WASHINGTON -- Scientific Collections International, or SciColl, a global consortium devoted to promoting the use and impact of object-based scientific collections across disciplines, hosted a two-day workshop in October 2014, bringing together some of the world’s leading minds in emerging infectious diseases.

Experts talk scientific collections' role in disease research

Some of the world’s leading minds in emerging infectious diseases met Thursday and Friday at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to discuss scientific collections’ role in the disease outbreak cycle and research.

Disease Collections and How They Can Save the World

In 1976, a young Belgian scientist named Peter Piot received a small, inconspicuous -- and broken -- vial of blood taken from a sick patient in the region that is now known as Democratic Republic of Congo. The sample, which had traveled as a passenger’s hand luggage in an ice box, was treated to the same routine lab tests as other medical samples. What Piot found under the microscope, however, was anything but ordinary. The worm-like structure belonged to a virus that looked remarkably similar to the Marburg virus, which, barely a decade earlier in Europe, had killed seven people in one fell swoop. After a lengthy visit to Africa by Piot and his colleagues, and the deaths of nearly 300 people, the epidemic was stopped. The Ebola virus had taken its place in medicine as an emerging infectious disease.