Foe
A Common
Members of the HMS community brought myriad skills to the fight against Ebola by Debra Bradley Ruder
VECTOR ANALYSIS: Bats, such as these fruit bats, can harbor the Ebola virus and may have been the zoonotic origin of the recent epidemic in West Africa.
STEPHEN BELCHER/MINDEN PICTURES/CORBIS
Last fall, as Ebola, a highly contagious and deadly
hemorrhagic illness, tore through West Africa, devastating families and straining fragile health systems, infectious disease physician Megan Murray ’90 jumped into action. Like others at HMS, Murray, an HMS professor of global health and social medicine, director of the research core in the HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, epidemiologist, and world-recognized expert in tuberculosis, began identifying urgent research questions raised by the epidemic and turned to HMS colleagues to help answer them. “We involved a lot of individuals who were working extraordinarily hard,” Murray says.
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