Ebola lecture at UC Berkeley Nano High

On Nov. 1st, 2014, my AP biology peers and I sat in on the class at UCB. The topic of the lecture was about Ebola, and Dr. Donald Pinkston Francis, who had worked on Ebola back in 1970s, gave us the lecture. He had worked in different countries such as Sudan, India, China and Bangladesh, so he is a very experienced epidemiologist.

At the beginning of the lecture, Dr. Francis introduced himself and his family in a humorous manner, saying “There is  inevitable fighting in the family, because my daughter goes to Stanford and my wife and I are Berkeley graduates.” And the audience laughed.

Later, Dr. Francis talked about some basic information about Ebola. It was interesting to know that a research group from UC Davis took the first Ebola virus picture (see below). Dr. Francis showed us the map of the Ebola outbreak regions. According to his map, Southwestern Africa had the most severe Ebola break.

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Furthermore, Dr. Francis also shared his experience working at Sudan with us. In truth, African countries were very underdevelopment and it lacked a great amount of medical resources. Dr. Francis was one the few foreign doctors who worked there, and the life condition was very terrible. For instance, there was no water for shower and the food was limited. There were many mosquitos too. Further more, the local people would follow the culture and burn the dead bodies in the open field. Dr. Francis led his group to stop such action, pointing out that disease could spread in this way.

However, even though Ebola is a terrible disease, it is not undefeated. As the health condition worldwide (especially in Africa) improved over years, fewer and fewer people got infected. Dr. Francis shared a chart with us to show that the cases of people getting infected with Ebola decreased over years.

At the end of the lecture, it was Q&A time. I had few questions to ask and I did not get very clear answers. For example, the biggest question I had was: Could the survivor’s blood plasma be applied as a drug to cure Ebola? And the Dr. Francis said there is a possibility, and yet Ebola virus will mutate, so the further research is still needed. I think such a response is rather vague, so this is the only part I do not necessarily like about the lecture.

However, I loved the trip as a whole, I got to visit Berkeley and sat in on its class, which made me get to know the college class ambience. I also hang out with my AP bio friends. On the way home we got to have some dessert at Cream (Yummy!) If there is another chance, I would definitely do it again.