Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter will join Stanford this academic year as a lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Carter, who has a PhD in theoretical physics, served in the Clinton and Obama administrations and is well known in academic and technology circles. 

"I am honored to join the remarkable team at Stanford, one of the country's top universities and a key center for technological and business innovation,” Carter said. “The regional context of Silicon Valley was also an important attraction for me: the creative – even unorthodox – approaches to solving challenges are a model for both the private and public sectors. All that combined with a motivated faculty and a dynamic student population made Stanford a great opportunity. And as a scientist, I was always encouraged as a student to use my knowledge for the public good, and I hope to inspire the same thinking in students here.”

At FSI, Carter will be the Payne Distinguished Visitor and will be responsible for delivering several lectures. He will also deliver the annual Drell Lecture, which is sponsored by FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

"Ash will bring to Stanford incomparable experience handling some of the most complex security issues facing the United States and the world,” said FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. “We are fortunate to have him at FSI, and know that he will make great contributions to the Institute's research and teaching missions."

"It is a true honor to have Secretary Carter join the Hoover Institution as a distinguished visiting fellow,” said Hoover Director John Raisian. “An expert on a broad range of foreign policy and defense matters, Ash brings a unique and worldly perspective, one that is in keeping with our mission statement of promoting ideas that define a free society. My colleagues and I look forward to having him join the fellowship."

Carter stepped down from his post at the Pentagon late last year after serving two years as the Deputy Secretary of Defense. As the agency’s second-ranking civilian, he oversaw a $600 billion budget and 2.4 million uniformed and civilian personnel. From 2009 to 2011 Carter was the Undersecretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.

“Ash Carter is an extraordinary scholar statesman who thinks deeply, probes broadly, and transforms the organizations he leads,” said Amy Zegart, CISAC’s co-director. “We are thrilled to have him join the CISAC community.”

Carter joined the Defense Department from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was a professor and chair of the International Relations, Science, and Security faculty.

Carter’s connection with the technology business dates to his previous position as a senior partner at Global Technology Partners, where he advised major investment firms on technology and defense. He is currently working with several companies in Silicon Valley.

Carter earned his bachelor’s degrees in physics and in medieval history from Yale in 1976, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. He was a Rhodes Scholar and received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford in 1979.

He was a physics instructor at Oxford, a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University and M.I.T., and an experimental research associate at Brookhaven and Fermilab National Laboratories. From 1993 to 1996, Carter served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, responsible for policy regarding the former Soviet states, strategic affairs, and nuclear weapons policy.

Carter recently joined the Markle Foundation to help lead the "Economic Future Initiative" to develop groundbreaking ideas for empowering Americans in today’s networked economic landscape.

CISAC Senior Fellow Scott Sagan and Affiliated Faculty Member Allen Weiner of the Stanford Law School teach "Rules of War," a Thinking Matters course that investigates the legal rules that govern the resort to, and conduct of war, and study whether these rules affect the conduct of states and individuals. The class will confront various ethical, legal, and strategic problems as they make decisions about military intervention and policies regarding the threat and use of force in an international crisis. The class culminates in one of CISAC's signature simulations in which students are assigned roles within the presidential cabinet.

Siegfried Hecker, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Research Professor of Management Science and Engineering, has been awarded the National Academy of Engineering's Arthur M. Bueche Award "for contributions to nuclear science and engineering and for service to the nation through nuclear diplomacy."

The award recognizes an engineer who has shown dedication in science and technology, as well as active involvement in determining U.S. science and technology policy. Bueche was a world-renowned chemist who helped pioneer engineered plastics at General Electric Research and led one of the most innovative industrial research centers in the world.

"He was also an astute student of science and technology policy and one of our country's most effective advisors," Hecker said of Bueche upon accepting the award on Sept. 28 during the NAE's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Hecker,  CISAC co-director from 2007-2012, is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction and nuclear security.

You can read the NAE's full announcement here.

Hecker talked about the significance of working with Russian scientists at the end of the Cold War and what he has learned during his 49 trips to the former Soviet states.

"The bottom line is that 22 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nothing really terrible has happened in the Russian nuclear complex - contrary to the expectations of most people in the West," said Hecker, who is currently working on a book about his diplomacy with Russia. "Critical to the success of our cooperation was what Bueche called the `international bonding' that technology provides."

But he noted that the relationship between Moscow and Washington are worse than at any time since the Gorbachev era. While he and his Russian colleagues have made great progress together over the last two decades, that their work is far from done.

"Indeed, the need for scientists and engineers to cooperate internationally is more important than ever. It is especially important in all things nuclear," he told the audience. "Since nuclear energy can electrify the world or destroy the world, the consequences of doing things right or doing them wrong are enormous. What we have learned over the years is that nuclear cooperation is essential - it promotes the benefits of nuclear energy - be it electricity, nuclear medicine or research. Nuclear isolation breeds suspicion and conflict."

Hecker noted he has also visited nuclear facilities and developed relationships with key scientists and engineers in the UK, France, China, India, North and South Korea, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and has held substantive discussions with nuclear specialists from Pakistan and Iran.

"Dialogue and cooperation are essential," he said. "The same holds true for other major societal issues such as energy, climate change, water and natural resources, infectious diseases, the future of the Internet. These challenges are truly international, and solutions are often prevented by political and ideological differences. That is why institutions like the NAE and the National Academies are crucial."

In this Wall Street Journal commentary by William J. Perry and George P. Shultz, the Stanford scholars argue that Russia has completely ignored the Budapest Memorandums on Security Assurances of 1994. They say Russia has taken Crimea and is actively stirring trouble in the eastern part of that country, a blatant violation of solemn vows.

The commentary can be read here.

Two-dozen congressional staffers joined academic and Silicon Valley experts at Stanford’s inaugural cybersecurity boot camp to discuss ways to protect the government, the public and industry from cyber attacks, network crimes and breaches of personal privacy.

The staffers listened to presentations from 25 business and technology leaders, as well as experts in privacy, civil liberties and intelligence during the three-day boot camp. They also took part in a role-playing exercise dealing with a cyber crisis, posing as staffers from the White House, Homeland Security, the State and Defense departments, as well as private enterprise.

The idea behind the workshop was to give Capitol Hill staffers the knowledge and contacts that will help them better craft legislation and policies on cybersecurity.

“We’re 3,000 miles away from Washington and we’re at ground zero for the tech revolution,” said CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart. She is also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, which co-sponsored the boot camp that that ran from Aug. 18-20.

“The boot camp is an important early step in what we envision to be a continuing, leading and lasting cyber program,” said Zegart, co-convener with Herbert Lin, chief scientist at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council of the National Academies, who joins Stanford in January as a senior scholar for cyber research and policy at CISAC and research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Zegart had three goals for the boot camp. One was to bring together computer and social scientists across campus and across the country “to broaden and deepen our cutting-edge scholarship.”

Then, from the networking that naturally took place, Zegart hopes to create a Track II cybersecurity council that will convene regularly with leaders from the U.S. government, scholars and key stakeholders from the private industry.

“And finally, we want enhanced education programs not only for students here at Stanford, but key stakeholders for cybersecurity policy,” she said.

The presentations were videotaped and will be packaged and used for educational purposes at Stanford and eventually be made public online.

Some of the staffers said the boot camp exceeded their expectations and they were grateful for the jam-packed, 72-hour crash course in all things cyber.

“What Stanford has done really successfully here is they brought together people from D.C. who wouldn’t necessarily talk to each other, from different committees, from different sides of the aisle,” said Jamil Jaffer, Republican chief counsel and senior advisor to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “Then from the valley community they brought lawyers, educators and technologists – you name it – from across the spectrum in a way that I’ve never seen before.”

He said he hoped CISAC and the Hoover Institution, which co-sponsored the Stanford Congressional Cyber Boot Camp, would convene the next boot camp with the New York business community as well.

“I think there’s a real opportunity to build bridges between these three major cities; I think we need to have these conversations together,” he said.

Staffers also exchanged views about the wide gap between the government and Silicon Valley tech companies with regard to privacy when they met with senior security chiefs at Google during a visit to the nearby Google X campus.

And there were plenty of lively debates about Internet security vs. privacy and whether the government should step in to police public networks.

Benjamin Wittes of Brookings and Hoover faced off with Jennifer Granick, director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society at the Law School.

“Liberty is a feature of security – and security is a feature of liberty,” Wittes said. “So the urge to think that any security measure is going to negatively impact your liberty, or conversely that anything that augments online liberty is going to have negative implications on security is a very easy, and I would say, very lazy instinct.”

Granick countered by saying most professionals in Silicon Valley do not trust the government to police the Internet without secret hacks. For example, documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden indicated the National Security Agency tapped into fiber optic cables transmitting data for Yahoo and Google.

“Last night you heard Eric Schmidt say that the NSA had hacked Google,” she said, referring to a keynote dinner conversation between the Google chairman and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at Hoover and the Freeman Spogli Institute.

The NSA has denied hacking into Google and Yahoo.

“Everyone here in Silicon Valley agrees with what he says,” she said. “Don’t fool yourself that he’s just saying that because that’s just Google marketing. Everybody at Twitter believes it; everybody at Facebook believes it. I am embedded in the privacy world and we’re all worried about consumer privacy and what these companies are doing with this information – but that doesn’t mean we trust the government to protect us.”

Aside from the government trust debate, other big takeaways were that surprisingly little is secure on the Internet and the threat of cyber attacks against the United States is one of the biggest issues facing Washington policymakers today.

They heard a warning in stark and unambiguous language from Jane Holl Lute, president of the Council on CyberSecurity and a consulting professor at CISAC.

"It's no longer possible to ignore this issue," said Lute, who until last year was deputy secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, where she was responsible for the day-to-day management of the department's efforts to prevent terrorism and enhance security. "Life online is fundamentally unsafe.”

She emphasized that the Internet is about "the power to connect, not to protect" and stressed the importance of practicing "cyber hygiene" to reduce problems. This includes monitoring the hardware and software running on a network, limiting administrative permissions, and real-time patching and monitoring of system vulnerabilities.

If organizations would just follow these steps, she said, 80 to 90 percent of cyber attacks would be prevented.

"We know a lot, but we're just not doing it,” she said.

Lute emphasized that today's world has an "existential reliance" on the Internet – more than 3 billion people in the world, including 80 percent of North Americans, have access to the Internet. All of this dependence comes against the reality that many companies and sites do not carry out basic hygiene to protect their networks.

The U.S. Senate and House staffers attending the boot camp come from both political parties and work on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Homeland Security, Appropriations, Judiciary, Energy and Commerce committees. The group also includes staffers working with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., among others.

Senior executives from Microsoft, Visa, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks and U.S. Venture Partners had a robust discussion about how their companies battle cyber crime and share network data.

Ellen Richey, global head of enterprise risk for Visa, talked about her frustration with the international organized crime rings that attack financial institutions and credit cards companies.

“And they’re using that money to finance other types of illicit activities, such as human trafficking, drugs and terrorism, yet their governments don’ t go after them, or if they do go after them, they are released due to corruption in the courts,” Richey said.

She said Visa believes that at the end of the day, it’s not possible to adopt measures that are going to adequately protect against the growing threat of cyber crimes.

“So we believe that the ultimate answer for us is to get vulnerable data out of their hands,” Richey said. “You’ve got to shrink the battlefield.”

Facebook CSO Joe Sullivan addresses the boot camp, Aug. 20, 2014.

And the staffers heard a plea by Joe Sullivan, chief security officer at Facebook, to join them in the valley’s quest for better network security.

“The pace that we work at here in Silicon Valley is amazing. It’s exciting and fun to be a part of – but it’s really scary, too,” said Sullivan, a former federal prosecutor devoted to high-tech crime. “There are challenges that we have to deal with every day and we have to have really large and nimble security teams that are thinking about the next big thing before it launches.

“The question is: are government agencies thinking about these issues? Far too often – that is not the case. Hopefully when you go back to Washington you think about how we engage companies, how we engage with government agencies, think about the roles that we all play.”

Sullivan talked about Facebook’s “white hat” program, in which the social network invites users to find security vulnerabilities and report them for a bounty.

He said they have spent $3 million in the last three years in payouts to users around the world, such as the young Palestinian man who was able to hack into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s page to warn him of a security flaw.

“We’ve focused on encryption, we’ve hired a lot of people and we’ve looked at data center traffic and all those things,” Sullivan said. “But one of the areas where I think we’ve tried to be at the forefront is about talking about security in a more open way.”

Sullivan said he believes there’s a “disconnect” when one talks about security between the private and public sectors and consumers.

“I feel like when the government talks about security, they’re talking about surveillance,” Sullivan said. “I think when consumers talk about security, they’re talking about safety.”

The big tech companies – Facebook, Microsoft and Google – must take “full ownership” of network security, though he wishes that were not always the case.

“We honestly don’t count on any government agency anywhere in the world to make the people who use Facebook secure,” he said. “We realize we have to do it on our own. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I would suggest it’s a bad thing. I think we’d all like more help in securing our services.”

For more details about the boot camp speakers and program, visit this website.

Stanford's Condoleeza Rice and Google's Eric Schmidt greet congressional staffers attending boot camp. ©Rod Searcey

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The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just before 18-year-old William J. Perry landed in Japan during the War of Occupation as a mapping specialist. He saw the devastation left behind by American firebombers on Tokyo and Okinawa.

The young man quickly understood the staggering magnitude of difference in the destruction caused by traditional firepower and these new atomic bombs. He would go on to devote his life to understanding, procuring and then trying to dismantle those weapons.

But that was seven decades back. And many young Americans today believe the threat of nuclear weapons waned alongside the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis.

So as faculty at Stanford and the Center for International Security and Cooperation evolve with the digital age by taking their lessons online, one of the university’s oldest professors is also adapting to online teaching in an effort to reach the youngest audience, urging them to take on the no-nukes mantle that he’s held for many years.

“The issue is so important to me that I tried all sorts of approaches from books and courses and lectures and conferences to try to get my contemporaries and the generations behind me engaged – all with limited success,” says the 86-year-old Perry, a CISAC faculty member and the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at the center’s parent organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“First – which is a sine qua non – they must become seriously concerned that there is a nuclear danger, which most of these kids don’t understand at all,” said Perry. “Secondly, we want to convince them that there is something they can actually do about it.”

To reach those students, he believes he must go digital. So Perry – who co-teaches with CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker the popular Stanford course, “Technology and National Security” – began to map out a classroom course that would be videotaped and serve as a pilot for an online class that would be free and open to the public.

That course, “Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday & Today” included lectures by some of the best people working in the field of nuclear nonproliferation today. Among those who will be highlighted in the online course are Perry and Hecker; Joe Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; Stanford nuclear historian David Holloway; Stanford political scientist Scott Sagan; and Ploughshares Fund president, Joseph Cirincione.

The Perry Project will produce short-segment videos highlighting key information and stories from the course, packaging them in an online course available in multiple platforms and possibly offered by the university.

Perry used his personal journey as a young soldier during WWII, a mathematician and later a developer of weapons for the U.S. nuclear arsenal as undersecretary of defense for the Carter administration – and then trying to dismantle those weapons as secretary of defense for President Bill Clinton.

“I’m not doing this simply because I want to put a notch on my belt, to say that I’ve done a MOOC,” Perry said. “I’m doing it because I really want to get across to hundreds of thousands of young people.”

Last summer, he launched the Perry Project by inviting a dozen high school and college students to campus for a nuclear weapons boot camp so that they could take back to campus the message that nuclear annihilation is still a real, contemporary possibility.

He asked them: How do I get through to your generation?

“They said, `We don’t get our information by books or even by television, we get it through social media and YouTube, the various social media platforms. And you want to make the message relevant and relatively compact,’” he recalls.

Perry listened. “Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday and Today” is in production now and a short-segment pilot video should be made available in the fall.

Cybersecurity fellow Jonathan Mayer to teach online class on surveillance.

CISAC is turning to other forms on online learning, as well.

Cybersecurity fellow Jonathan Mayer is teaching an online course in surveillance law.

And lectures from CISAC's signature course, “International Security in a Changing World” (PS114S) will soon go up on YouTube as lecture modules entitled, “Security Matters.”

“Online learning offers a way to expand CISAC's reach to new audiences, geographies, and generations,” says CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart, who has co-taught the popular course for the past few years with CISAC’s Martha Crenshaw.

“At the same time, the PS114 online modules will give us a living lecture library so that future Stanford students can compare faculty lectures on similar topics across time – learning, for example, how Martha Crenshaw assessed the terrorist threat in 2010 vs. 2015,” Zegart said.

Guest lecturers whose presentations will be included for the YouTube package include:

• Jack Snyder of Columbia University: Democratization and Violence
• Francis Fukuyama of Stanford: The Changing Nature of Power
• Zegart: Understanding Policy Decisions: The Cuban Missile Crisis
• Scott Sagan of CISAC: The Nuclear Revolution; and Why Do States Build/Forego Nuclear Weapons?
• Abbas Milani, director of Iran Studies at Stanford: Historical Perspective on Iran
• Former FBI Director Robert Mueller: the FBI’s Transformation Post 9/11
• U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry (Ret.) and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan: The War in Afghanistan and the Future of Central Asia
• Jane Holl Lute, former deputy secretary of Homeland Security: Emerging Threats in Cybersecurity
• Perry: Security Issues in Russia, Yesterday and Today
• Brad Roberts: former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy: Ensuring a (Nuclear) Deterrence Strategy that is Effective for 21^st Century Challenges
• CISAC Co-Director David Relman: Doomsday Viruses

And lectures at CISAC’s Cybersecurity Boot Camp for senior congressional aids will also be videotaped and packaged for YouTube and online consumption later this year.

“We are excited to enter into this phase of experimentation to see what works, what doesn't, and how we can further CISAC's teaching mission both here at Stanford and around the world,” Zegart said.

(Updated Nov. 7, 2014)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Nov. 4 that the death toll from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has risen to above 4,960 and that an estimated 8,168 people, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, have contracted the virus since March. It is the largest and most severe outbreak of the Ebola virus since it was first detected four decades ago. All but nine of the deaths were in those three countries; eight were in Nigeria and one patient died in the United States.

The CDC in October proclaimed that in the worst-case scenario, Sierra Leone and Liberia could have 1.4 million cases by Jan. 20, 2015, if the disease keeps spreading without immediate and immense intervention to contain the virus.

Two American aid workers infected with Ebola while working in West Africa were transported to a containment unit at Emory University in Atlanta for treatment, raising public fears about international spread of the highly virulent virus that has no known cure. The two were released from the hospital after being the first humans to receive an experimental Ebola drug called ZMapp. Another man who recently helped an Ebola victim in Liberia traveled to Texas and died in a Dallas hospital. Two of the nurses who treated him caught the virus as well, but have been released from the hospital. Some states have struggled with the moral 

We ask CISAC biosecurity experts David Relman and Megan Palmer to answer several questions about Ebola and the public health concerns and policy implications. Relman is the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation who has served on several federal committees investigating biosecurity matters. He is the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor in the Departments of Medicine and of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Past-President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Palmer is the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC and a Researcher at the UC Berkeley Center for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), and served as Deputy Director of Policy & Practices for the Multi-University NSF Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC).

The two of them have answered the questions together.

What is Ebola and how dangerous is it compared to other diseases?

Ebola is an acute viral infectious disease, often associated with severe hemorrhagic fever. While initial symptoms are flu-like, they can rapidly progress, and include vomiting, reduced ability to regulate immune responses and other physiological processes, sometimes leading to internal and external bleeding. The disease has an incubation period that can last up to 21 days, but patients typically become ill four to nine days after infection, and die about seven to ten days later. Fatality rates for the current Ebola outbreak are nearing 60% (according to the CDC), while past outbreaks in the Republic of Congo have seen rates as high as 90%. This outbreak to date has resulted in nearly 1,000 deaths, more than any previous Ebola outbreak.

Ebola virus is believed to reside in animals such as fruit bats where it does not cause disease, but is then transmitted to and among humans and other primates, in whom disease typically does occur. The route by which the virus crosses between species remains largely unknown. People become infectious once they become symptomatic. Ebola is transmitted via blood or bodily fluid, but can persist outside the body for a couple days. Infection can occur through unprotected contact with the sick, but also when contaminated equipment such as needles cut through healthcare workers’ protective gear, and also through contact with infected individuals postmortem.

David Relman Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

Ebola’s horrific symptoms provoke public fear, and it becomes easy to lose perspective on the relative spread and toll of this outbreak. Ebola is relatively difficult to transmit. This means the latest Ebola outbreak is still small in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of people killed each year via more easily transmitted airborne influenza strains and other diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. It’s important that we not lose sight of more chronic, but less headline-grabbing diseases that will be pervasive, insidious long-standing challenges for Africa and elsewhere.

Is there a vaccine or cure?

There is no vaccine for Ebola and no tried-and-true cure. Health workers can only give supportive care to patients and try to stop the spread to new victims.

Several experimental therapies for Ebola are under development. One receiving attention is ZMapp, a mix of antibodies produced by mice exposed to the virus that have been adapted to improve their human compatibility. Limited tests in primates show early promise, but the drug had not been tried on humans -- until now. Two Americans transported back to the U.S. from West Africa received the experimental therapy. While the two seem to be improving, it isn’t clear that ZMapp was responsible; another issue is that ZMapp and other potential therapies have not been cleared by the FDA for wider use in humans.

The process for approval, and who gets priority access to such drugs, are complex policy issues. The WHO will be convening leaders and medical ethicists next week to discuss how to develop and distribute experimental therapies. This is not a simple task; many factors need to be taken into consideration and balanced with limited information to guide decisions.

Successful or not, and despite any approval, it’s still uncertain whether enough of such drugs could even be produced quickly enough to respond to this particular outbreak, and if not - whether they’d be effective in a future outbreak.

You can listen to Relman in this KQED Public Radio talk show.

Relman joins other experts in a Stanford panel on Ebola

Why has this Ebola outbreak involved so many more people, and spread to a wider geographic area,  than previous outbreaks?

This is an evolving investigation and many potential contributing factors are being examined by scientists racing to collect information that can help them get ahead of the outbreak.

One factor is population density. This latest outbreak spread early into denser population areas within Liberia and Sierra Leone, rather than remain confined to isolated villages, as in earlier outbreaks in Central Africa. With a greater number of people being exposed within a smaller geographic area, the likelihood of transmission increases. Of particular concern is the prospect that the virus might take hold in Lagos, Nigeria, where a handful of cases have been recently identified. If this were to spread in Lagos, Africa’s most populous city, the death toll would likely increase dramatically.   

Another factor is the ability of affected regions to mount an effective public health response. This outbreak is occurring in three of the poorest African countries: Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. Civil wars have likely contributed to degradation of an already relatively poor public health infrastructure. This is also the first Ebola outbreak in the region, and the inexperience of local authorities can delay responses and fuel fearful community responses, undermining the ability to deal with the outbreak early when it’s more easily contained.

Cultural practices around the care of the sick and the dead can also fuel progression of an outbreak. In some parts of Western Africa, washing deceased relatives is commonplace. Customs like these increase the likelihood of the infection spreading through proximity between infected individuals and their family members

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What can be done to curtail the outbreak?

Isolation and quarantine are key to fighting the spread of Ebola. Isolation involves removing infected individuals from the general population to prevent the spread of disease. Quarantine, however, involves removing uninfected or potentially infected individuals from the general population to limit the spread of disease.

Thus far, the strategy to fight Ebola is dependent on isolating infected patients. Unsurprisingly, isolation efforts have proven hard to enforce. Some families, faced with the prospect of being confined to their homes, have denied the existence of Ebola in their localities, or refuted doctors who claim that one of their family members is sick. This is not unique to Africa; Americans had violent reactions to quarantine during the spread of smallpox. Some regions are now taking more extreme measures: Sierra Leone has deployed its army to enforce isolation at clinics and infected families’ homes, but this also risks civil unrest.

These tensions underscore the necessity of improved education and enforcement mechanisms within public health strategies. Response measures involve fundamental tradeoffs between liberty and safety. Because negotiations occur through complex local, national and international processes, one of the biggest risks is that decisions don’t keep pace with disease spread.

It’s important that we not lose sight of more chronic, but less headline-grabbing diseases that will be pervasive, insidious long-standing challenges for Africa and elsewhere."

How likely is it that the disease will spread into and within the United States?

Currently, airports in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea are screening all outbound passengers for Ebola symptoms such as fever. This includes asking passengers to complete healthcare questionnaires. However, it is difficult to reliably know who has been infected until they are symptomatic. Individuals could theoretically board a plane before they show symptoms, but develop them upon landing in the United States or elsewhere. This makes containing Ebola difficult, but not impossible.

If the virus were to enter the United States, it would be easier to contain and harder to spread. This virus does not transmit that easily to other humans, especially in settings with good infection control and isolation.

As viruses spread, the chances of genetic variation increase. Yet despite all the concerns from the current outbreak, Ebola is relatively bad at spreading in comparison to respiratory viral diseases such as influenza or measles. The likelihood of a pandemic Ebola virus in the near future seems slim as long as it cannot be transmitted via air.  While it’s possible that the Ebola virus could evolve, there is little evidence to suggest major genetic adaptations at this time.

What are some broader lessons about the dynamics and ecology of emerging infectious diseases that can help prevent or respond to outbreaks now and in the future?

These latest outbreaks remind us that potential pathogens are circulating, replicating and evolving in the environment all the time, and human action can have an immense impact on the emergence and spread of infectious disease.

We are starting to see common factors that may be contributing to the frequency and severity of outbreaks. Increasing human intrusion into zoonotic disease reservoir habitats and natural ecosystems, increasing imbalance and instability at the human-animal-vector interface, and more human population displacement all are likely to increase the chance of outbreaks like Ebola.

Megan Palmer Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

The epicenter of this latest outbreak was Guéckédou, a village near the Guinean Forest Region. The forest there has been routinely exploited, logged, and neglected over the years, leading to an abysmal ecological status quo. This, in combination with the influx of refugees from conflicts in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Cote d’Ivoire, has compounded the ecological issues in the area, potentially facilitating the spread of Ebola. There seems to be a strong relationship between ecological health and the spread of disease, and this latest outbreak is no exception.

While forensic analyses are ongoing, unregulated food and animal trade in general is also a key factor in the spread of infectious diseases across large geographic regions. Some studies suggest that trade of primates, including great apes, and other animals such as bats, may be responsible for transit of this Ebola strain from Central to Western Africa.

What are some of the other political and security implications of the outbreak and response?

Disease outbreaks can catalyze longer-term political and security issues in addition to more acute tensions.

There are complex international politics involved in emergency response and preparedness. Disease outbreaks often occur in poor regions, and demand help from more wealthy regions. The nature of the response reflects many factors - technical, social, political, legal and economic. Leaders often lack the expertise to take all these factors into account. It is an ongoing challenge to adapt our governance processes to be more reliable and move from damage control to planning. Organizations like the World Health Organization can provide guidance, but more resources and expertise are needed to get ahead of future disasters.

When help is provided, there is often mistrust of non-local workers, who can even be seen as sources of the disease. At a political level, distrust has been fueled by disguising political missions as health interventions, as was the case with the effort that led to the locating of Osama Bin Laden.

There are other security implications of this latest epidemic. This outbreak has led to a dramatic increase in the availability of Ebola virus in unsecured locations across West Africa, as well as to a growing number of labs across the world studying the disease. The immediate need to study the disease and develop beneficial interventions needs to be coupled to considerations of safety and security. From a safety standpoint, a rise in the handling of Ebola samples risks accidental transmission. From a security standpoint, those who wish to cause harm with this virus could acquire it from bodies, graves and other natural sources in the affected region. Both of these risks demand attention and efforts at mitigation.