Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World Digital Exhibit

Pathogens can spread through the air, in water, and by human or animal bodily fluids.

Some pathogens spread more easily than others. Common behaviors can help the spread. Simple changes can stop it.

• Don’t touch living or dead wild animals. If you do, wash your hands thoroughly afterward or use hand sanitizer. 

Insects like mosquitoes can spread pathogens when they suck blood from an infected animal or person and then bite an uninfected one.

• Wear insect repellent and protective clothing in high-risk areas.

Contact tracing involves finding everyone exposed to an infected person and then isolating and treating those with symptoms.

Even one missed contact means the disease can continue to spread.

We always feared getting infected with Ebola and our neighbors stigmatized us. The most dangerous episode I experienced was delivering a baby from an Ebola-confirmed woman in the middle of the night shift.

—Jackson Naimah, Physician Assistant, ELWA-3 Ebola Treatment Center

I imagined families sharing stories as they cut and sewed [the AIDS quilt]. It could be therapy for a community paralyzed by grief and rage and powerlessness. It could reveal the humanity behind the statistics.

—Cleve Jones, Founder of The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt

To understand how infectious diseases impact my community, I collect and interpret data about what viruses are present, who has been exposed, and what groups are at risk. These data inform my strategy for preventing further transmission.

—LaQuandra Nesbitt, Director of the District of Columbia’s Department of Health

• Molecular dating suggests that HIV spilled over into humans around 1910 in central Africa—perhaps when a chimpanzee carrying a closely related virus was butchered for meat. 
• Over the next several decades, people who were infected but unaware passed along the disease. 
• When HIV arrived in urban centers along the Congo River, it spread rapidly, undetected, eventually traveling around the globe. 
• Since the HIV pandemic began in 1981, more than 78 million people have been infected worldwide, and 35 million have died. 

People affected by infectious diseases can face stigma: extreme public disapproval and negative beliefs associated with the disease and how it is transmitted.

These beliefs are used to justify unfair and hostile behavior toward victims and survivors—and those who care for them.

Effective public information campaigns—including outreach by community health workers—can help fight fear and stigma against patients and their families by combating common misconceptions about a disease.

Stigma affects everyone. Individuals may delay testing or treatment. Children may stop attending school. Entire groups of people may be rejected from their communities or blamed for the disease itself.

Community-based programs that provide direct support and care to affected people, and information to those not infected, can help reduce stigma and its effects.

People and animals transmit Ebola virus through sweat, saliva, feces, vomit, and blood, even after death.

Traditional practices of hunting primates for food and washing dead loved ones before burial contributed to Ebola outbreaks in Congo and West Africa.

But when community members adopted safe, culturally acceptable hunting and burial practices, they helped stop the outbreaks.