Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Tiny Spark podcast, experts explore how a toxic culture damaged the response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. 

• How can funders work to ensure that future outbreak responses go more smoothly? 

• Read about a philanthropic Ebola strategy for DRC. 

We look back on some of the unsavory things that went on behind the scenes among those who responded to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa four years ago. And given the chances that these deadly epidemics will rear their heads across the globe again and again, it’s important to figure out what went wrong there among the helpers – whether doctors, local nurses, researchers or international aid groups.

One of the most prominent among the first responders was Dr. Sheikh Humarr Khan, a global expert in tropical disease who had worked on more cases of hemorrhagic fever than perhaps anyone else in the world. In 2014, he found himself overwhelmed, at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak, treating patients at the hospital he led in Sierra Leone. When Khan himself succumbed to the virus, there was debate among leading health experts over whether to give Khan an experimental drug that had not yet been tested on humans. “This is a man who is the most informed person on earth as to whether or not he’d take the drug,” Dr. Pardis Sabeti tells us. “I thought it was being given to him. I thought he was being engaged. I was devastated when I learned he wasn’t.”

Read the full article about the Ebola outbreak response in 2014 by Amy Costello at Nonprofit Quarterly.