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This chapter examines how established media – that is, print, TV and radio sources which pre-existed the popularisation of social media – use social media to disseminate content. Specifically it examines the manner in which three UK media sources – BBC News, The Guardian and the Daily Mail – used Twitter during the 2014–2015 Ebola crisis. It asks five key questions concerning: the balance between factual reporting and opinion or comment; the degree to which it shifted attention to specific events within the context of the outbreak; whether the dialogical potential of social media was exploited; the degree to which social media acted as a signpost to more detailed information elsewhere, or existed as independent content; and the degree of media reflexivity. It concludes that established media used this new technology within their existing paradigms for reporting rather than exploiting some of its more innovative characteristics.

Eradicating Ebola from West Africa was struggled with from 2014 through 2016. While at first inefficient and ineffective, undeniable progress was made in responding to the outbreak once countries and organizations steeled themselves for the task at hand. A separate outbreak occurred concurrently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) during this period. This episode marked the seventh time that DRC had dealt with the virus over a roughly 45-year span. In 2017, there was an eighth occurrence. Moreover, in 2018, DRC faced its ninth and tenth outbreaks. Comparing the experiences of countries in West Africa facing the disease for the first time, with a state that has a long history addressing its impact, is offered here as a means of better understanding successful disease management where public health epidemics are concerned. Results indicate that early investment in cultivating disease-specific practices, combined with establishing cooperative networks of actors across levels of political response, enables improved mitigation and response during outbreaks.

This case puts students in the shoes of the Ebola response leadership teams of Firestone Liberia and its parent company, Bridgestone Americas, as they worked together to respond to the deadly 2014 Ebola epidemic. While the companies had received positive press for their containment of the virus on their rubber farm in Liberia, which was home to 8,000 employees and 80,000 Liberian citizens, the situation off the property was worsening. With death counts rising and hospitals across the nation closing as staff caught the virus, the Liberian government declared a national state of emergency. The teams now faced the possibility that the government might attempt to take control of the farm's medical center. How could they balance their duty to care effectively for employees against the demands of the Liberian government? Should they try to fend off the government or cooperate to meet the government's demands? Students will learn how to do a methodical situation analysis that considers ethical obligations and strategic implications, and to distill their recommendation into a briefing for senior leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to identify salient topic categories and outline their evolution patterns and temporal trends in microblogs on a public health emergency across different stages. Comparisons were also examined to reveal the similarities and differences between those patterns and trends on microblog platforms of different languages and from different nations.

A total of 459,266 microblog entries about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 on Twitter and Weibo were collected for nine months after the inception of the outbreak. Topics were detected by the latent Dirichlet allocation model and classified into several categories. The daily tweets were analyzed with the self-organizing map technique and labeled with the most salient topics. The investigated time span was divided into three stages, and the most salient topic categories were identified for each stage.

In total, 14 salient topic categories were identified in microblogs about the Ebola outbreak and were summarized as increasing, decreasing, fluctuating or ephemeral types. The topical evolution patterns of microblogs and temporal trends for topic categories vary on different microblog platforms. Twitter users were keen on the dynamics of the Ebola outbreak, such as status description, secondary events and so forth, while Weibo users focused on background knowledge of Ebola and precautions.

This study revealed evolution patterns and temporal trends of microblog topics on a public health emergency. The findings can help administrators of public health emergencies and microblog communities work together to better satisfy information needs and physical demands by the public when public health emergencies are in progress.

This paper attempts to discuss the synergies between the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and Ebola preparedness and response – with a specific outlook about how the five (5) targets in SDG.3 can be prioritized and integrated into the measures taken against the battle of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in the Democratic Republic Congo (DRC) as well as any other sporadic health disasters and emergencies elsewhere.

This paper draws on the published literature, including reports, peer-reviewed articles, statistical data and relevant documents identified from authenticated sources.

Sustainable development, which is the nitty-gritty of SDGs, is underscored as a germane in almost all regional and international frameworks. However, as traditional natural hazards persist, alongside the persistence of civil conflicts and instability, socioeconomic challenges such as EVD pose serious hindrances to SDGs, and achieving them by 2030 might be a deferred dream, especially in low- and middle-income countries such as DRC.

This paper will help to inform the decisions of bureaucrats at different levels, especially those aimed at promoting and integrating health into sustainable development.

The recent 2018 EVD outbreaks in DRC, which galvanized the regional and global attention, call for an approach that elucidates an interaction between the SDGs and countermeasures of responding to this deadly disease in the DRC and elsewhere.

The largest ever outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD), which began in December 2013, profoundly impacted not only the West African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and to a lesser extent Nigeria, but also the rest of the world because some patients needed to be managed in high-resource countries. As of March 29, 2016, there were 28,616 confirmed, probable, and suspected cases of EVD reported in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone during the outbreak, with 11,310 deaths (case fatality rate of 39.5%). An unprecedented number of healthcare workers and professionals, including physicians, nurses, logistic and administrative personnel, housekeepers, epidemiologists, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, and ethics experts in many countries, were directly or indirectly involved in the care of EVD patients.

The provision of medical care to critically ill EVD patients would have been challenging in any setting but was especially so in the remote and resource-limited areas where patients were stricken by EVD. Limited health personnel, medical supplies, and equipment, along with inadequate knowledge and skills for minimizing the risks of transmission to healthcare workers, could have led to the de-prioritization of patient care. However, ethical considerations demanded aggressive patient care (intensive care, dialysis, central vascular catheter indwelling, etc.) to produce positive outcomes without increasing the risks to healthcare workers and caregivers.

A major ethical consideration was that healthcare workers have a double obligation: while providing the best medical care to improve EVD patient survival, with symptom relief and palliation as required, they must also protect themselves and minimize further transmission to others, including their colleagues. During the 2014–2015 EVD epidemic, another ethical and clinical problem arose in relation to the management of healthcare workers deployed in Africa who acquired EVD while caring for infected patients. As of June 24, 2015, a total of 65 individuals had been evacuated or repatriated worldwide from the EVD-affected countries, of whom 38 individuals were evacuated or repatriated to Europe. The need for evacuation and repatriation, together with associated ethical issues, is discussed in this chapter.

The devastating 2014 Ebola outbreak caused human and economic loss, but it also resulted in remarkable improvement in healthcare leadership. The impact is most evident in the affected West African countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. In this chapter, the Ebola experience is used as a framework to explore the essential elements of healthcare leadership, with particular attention to healthcare crises in under-resourced communities. Overall, healthcare leadership presents unique challenges. In common with leaders of other industries, healthcare leaders must inspire others, create a sense of purpose, make difficult decisions and collaborate with a range of people. But, because their focus is on complex systems that aim to improve people's physical and mental well-being, expectations of healthcare leaders are especially high. Their work can be a matter of life or death. For the leader in an under-resourced area, the challenge and expectations are even higher, particularly in the face of new or emerging health threats. The key to effective healthcare leadership is systems thinking which involves looking at the entire system of care as an integrated whole, rather than discrete parts that operate in isolation. Healthcare leaders must understand that health means mobilizing multisectoral knowledge and resources and applying innovative and multiactor approaches to prevent, detect and address health problems. Since the 2014 Ebola crisis, healthcare leaders are increasingly using a systems approach by looking at the culture of health systems, the impact of diseases locally and globally, and the applicability of health interventions in different environments. In the post-Ebola era, steps to strengthen the healthcare system are described which includes the roles of healthcare leaders. These steps include deployment of field epidemiologists and community health agents, community education and fuller use of the One Health Platform, which allows actors from different sectors (human health, animal health and environmental health) to collaborate. Finally, suggestions for healthcare leadership training are offered.

This study aims to improve disaster management. Social media, particularly microblog, has become a new platform for public opinion dissemination. However, few studies have been conducted to explore the structure of public opinions, the approaches for facilitating the spread of public opinions and the results of public opinion dissemination in the context of mobile internet for the purpose of improving disaster management.

This paper chooses Ebola as the research topic and extracts 14,735 Ebola-related data items from Sina Microblogs to examine the information nodes of public opinion and the characteristics of propagation paths on mobile internet. Particularly, nodes of public opinion between mobile terminals and non-mobile terminals are compared.

The results of this paper reveal the characteristics of public opinion propagation on mobile internet and verify the effectiveness of public opinion propagation on mobile internet. This study shows that public opinions propagate quickly, widely and efficiently and further generate great impacts on mobile internet.

The methods used in this study can be useful for the government agencies and other relevant organizations to monitor public opinions, identify issues and problems proactively and develop strategies in a more efficient manner to improve disaster management.

The results of this paper are helpful for related departments to monitor public opinions and to further improve disaster management.

This paper explores the mechanism of public opinion dissemination on mobile internet and further investigates how to improve disaster management through a case study related to Ebola.

The purpose of this paper is to juxtapose chaos theory with organizational learning theory to examine whether public organizations co-evolve into a new order or rather institutionalize newly gained knowledge in times of a highly complex public health crisis.

The research design utilizes the results from a survey administered to 200 emergency management and public health officials in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex.

The findings of this paper suggest that public entities were more likely to represent organizational learning through the coordination of professionals, access to quality information, and participation in daily communication. Leadership was associated with the dissemination of knowledge through the system rather than the development of new standard operating procedures (as suggested by chaos theory and co-evolution).

There are limitations to this study given the purposive sample of emergency management and public health officials employed in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex.

The authors find that public organizations that learn how to respond to unprecedented events through reliance on structure, leadership, and culture connect decision makers to credible information resulting in organizational learning.

As a result, public administrators need to focus and rely on their organization’s capacity to receive and retain information in a crisis.

This research contributes to our understanding of organizational learning in public organizations under highly complex public health situations finding decisions makers rely on both organizational structure and culture to support the flow of credible information.