Do you want me to answer that one? Okay.
Thank you very much for the question. Actually, it's an interesting question, because we just held the 14th World Congress on Public Health in India two months ago. I was the chair of the planning committee for that event, and we had more than 1,650 people from 70 countries. One of the topics discussed was the ebola situation. Actually, it was at a session organized by our own International Development Research Centre.
One of the critical elements that people felt should be looked at was that disease surveillance systems needed to be upgraded drastically. First, emergency preparation plans had to be put in place and applied, not just written up and put in a desk drawer, which has happened; and we needed to have sufficient internal response, basically country capacity response, for these emergencies.
Unfortunately, as we saw in the countries that were affected, many of the medical staff were affected by ebola and several of them died. Once you've lost a highly trained person in these countries, you've lost a generation of people. So how do we improve the internal capacity to take care of public health emergencies?
I think one of the other issues that came to light was the whole issue—and it reflects on sociology and anthropology—of understanding people's belief systems. One of the issues that was dealt with was the preparation of dead people, the washing of bodies; and of course, this couldn't be done with someone who had been infected with ebola, but people refused to bury them without doing these practices. So how do we, as health people, understand these practices and work with communities in order to protect them but, at the same time, take into account these very important social aspects?
I'll leave it at that for the moment.