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.

Monday Morning Coffee Break: July 18

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Monday Morning Coffee Break: Dec. 28

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A Brief History of Malaria

Fig.1. Tu Youyou (right) and tutor Lou Zhicen in 1950s (Credit: Xinhua News Agency) 

In 1967, Mao Zedong held a meeting in Beijing to discuss the major problem of drug-resistant malaria affecting soldiers on the front lines of the Vietnam War. Efforts in the United States resulted in the discovery of the drug mefloquine, but the North Vietnamese turned to China for aid. A program was formed that involved more than 500 scientists from around China to develop effective antimalarial medication. Among those scientists was Tu Youyou, a pharmacologist who is now a 2015 Nobel Prize recipient in Physiology or Medicine for her work in drug development.

Monday Morning Coffee Break: April 13

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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.