Digital volunteers are racing to map regions in
West Africa where the Ebola virus, which has a 90 percent fatality
rate, continues to spread
When the first Ebola virus victims were identified in Guinea in
February, no one knew it would be the start of an unprecedented
With no vaccine, no treatment and no real understanding of its
viral point of origin, it is one of the most deadly diseases on the
planet to aflict humans. All you can do to stem its spread is
sterilise, sterilise, sterilise, and potentially close transport
Less than two months later, though, after the disease spread to
the congested and cramped capital of Conakry, the virus has killed
more than 100 people across three countries, spreading from Guinea
to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Historically, outbreaks have always
been confined to one country.
"I don't think anyone has ever faced this," Paul Jenkins, head
of partnership development at the British Red Cross, told
The only way to get ahead of it, is to make sure emergency
response teams have the right information as soon as information
flow allows. And that's where Open Street Maps (OSM) comes in.
The platform has been a hotbed for digital humanitarianism in
recent years, helping track the devastation and impact of Typhoon
Haiyan last year.
This time around, the network sprung into action after a team
from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) realised there was little to no
map data for the regional districts where outbreaks had occurred in
Guinea. The team was working blind, going off of local knowledge
Now, this is what Guinea looks like in digital form.
Zoom in and you can see road networks and important linkages
between towns and countries, where there were none before. Overlay
this with victim data, and it can help explain the rapid spread.
Click on the coloured blobs and you will see sites of confirmed
deaths, suspected cases that have been overturned, sites where
Ebola testing labs have been setup or where the emergency relief
teams are currently located.
"During Typhoon Haiyan, everyday we saw how much it helped our
teams in their responses," Jenelle Eli from the American Red Cross,
which has joined in the mapping effort, told Wired.co.uk. "They
were hanging the printouts up in their tents everyday, using them
to identify roads that were damaged or even to give drivers
redirections. They told us it saved them hours."
"We hope we'll have really great success stories this time
Haiyan was the first real foray into realtime emergency response
mapping for the Red Cross. They had experimented after the fall of
Gaddafi in Tunisia, with a sole employee mapping a refugee camp for
internal use. Then, after the cholera outbreak in Sierra Leone in
2012, and most recently the US branch collaborated with the Ugandan
Red Cross to build a map for future emergencies. Robert Banick,
field Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
coordinator at the American Red Cross explains how his team works
not just to build reactive systems, but preventative ones.
"We held a big mapathon remotely and one here at HQ, because
it's easier to experiment that way -- you have time to set up and
think things through, and if the system breaks we can fix it. The
cities in Uganda basically didn't exist on a map, and thanks to
civil war in the country that area had tripled in size. There was
no accurate map to show that."
With Haiyan, that practice came into play. But the areas were
vast, with operations spread in rural areas and everywhere in
By contrast, the Ebola outbreak in Guinea -- though not getting
the kind of media attention the Philippines disaster received --
has been concentrated in several cities, so the Red Cross has
witnessed vast amounts of work happen in a much shorter time frame.
"We had about a fourth of the contribution we got over two months
in the Philippines, in a matter of days here," said Cross.
The maps are built almost from scratch, jigsawing together
satellite data from the US State Department and Skybox Imaging. Any
additional layer of information can then be added.
"It's probably the best picture of what's all happening
together, and volunteers are keeping that all up to date," says
Andrew Braye, part of the UK mapping team at the British Red Cross.
Where we would have seen a dot on the map previously, he adds, we
can zoom in on individual city buildings. Alongside that work, he's
been building a Google Doc for the International Federation of Red
Cross -- which is in Guinea helping coordinate the effort --
where all the latest news and data is collated.
"When people go into individual towns we need operational maps
so we know where can we do this or that, where everyone else is
working. The value is in being able to see the bigger picture, and
that's happening much more collaboratively now."
The World Health Organisation has joined in, building its own static maps to show a detailed breakdown of
cases. All that information can now be fed in to the OSM map by
digital humanitarians on the prowl.
"OSM is pulling in confirmed cases, and MSF and Red Cross data,"
says Braye. "MSF and ourselves would have subsets of that -- we all
have different operational strengths and we would use that
internally to figure out what do we do next. But it's nice to see
it all come together -- we can see the whole district, individual
cases, and start overlaying things like transport routes and
rainflow, to try and understand what's going on with the virus.
"Anyone has access it and can see what's useful to them, what's
happening immediately around them, or current news cases. It is the
whole picture. When you zoom out it looks like lots of stuff might
be happening in one town. But you can zoom in and see it's all
clustered round one side of town or very dispersed. That's the
value of having it on a proper map rather than a pretty map. Where
the actual cases are noted, that's when it starts becoming useful.
It's about how this is moving, where people are moving, and the
food networks moving it."
Banick says the Red Cross wants to build in an engine for the
maps at some point, so users can identify the quickest route from A
to B, depending on things like road quality and surface, as well as
This kind of humanitarian collaboration -- MSF, international
branches of the Red Cross and digital volunteers all tapping in
information from across the globe -- could not have come
"Fatality rates for Ebola are 90 percent," Jenkins tells
Wired.co.uk. "That's what makes it such an appalling disease. There
is no treatment, just symptomatic things like stopping sufferers
Jenkins explains the natural reservoir host of the virus has
never been identified. It has been speculated it's an animal host
-- many of the historical outbreaks have occurred in the central
Africa, and links were therefore made to primates and even
Another major problem with tackling Ebola, Jenkins adds, is how
indistinct it is. Outbreaks are sporadic, with no defined point of
origin, so it is easily mistaken for other diseases such as Yellow
Fever at the start. The problem with misdiagnosing, is that Ebola
is also highly infectious, passed by bodily fluids.
"If medical staff are not aware of what the disease is, the risk
to them and other patients is enormous, which is why the infection
rates among medical staff has been so high. People become terrified
and run away. Health workers fear dying from the disease, so a lot
of people flee.
"On top of this, many clinics and hospitals in poor countries
and rural areas will not have the capacity to safely care for
people with disease -- they won't have gowns and gloves or
This is where the likes of MSF and the International
Federation of Red Cross come in -- to identify the disease
and ensure the local community understands it and how it has been
Miscommunication can be fatal, in more than one way.
We saw this week how a MSF clinic in Macenta, south Guinea, had
to be abandoned after staff were attacked. The local community
believed it was the doctors that had brought Ebola to Guinea in the
first place, and that MSF was killing people by placing them in
sick wards before diagnosing them. Explaining the outbreak and its
spread, is key to saving lives and preventing violent incidents
such as these.
"I was working in Congo, Brazzaville, where 203 people had died
from Ebola," says Jenkins. "After the first outbreaks, the
community reaction was very hostile. People believed we were
bringing in the disease. You have to give some very difficult
This is because of the high infection rate of Ebola. If someone
has died from the disease, their bodies must not be touched and it
needs to be buried safely. Their property has to be disinfected or
"This is a pretty sensitive thing to tell people, particularly
in areas where there are certain rights and customs round
In Sierra Leone instructions
have been delivered to stop eating particular animals,
including monkeys, chimpanzees and bats -- or fruit these animals
have partially eaten -- because of the links between Ebola and
This is where local members of the humanitarian teams come in,
to help spread the message while ensuring it's not seen as though
outsiders are insensitively delivering instructions. Otherwise,
local papers and SMS or radio alerts are used.
For Jenkins, the fears around the outbreak remain. Previous
cases have generally been in rural areas. Today, major cities are
"It's worrying how that transmission is happening. It's a
function of it being in a bigger centre, where people are
Senegal has voluntarily closed its border, but otherwise routes
are open and the spread continues.
"The problem is the cat's out of the bag -- will closing borders
now do anything? We can't vaccinate. It certainly worries me a
Eventually, Jenkins says, the virus will burn out. But before
then, there's nothing to stop its transfer if awareness and
diagnosis are not rapid enough.
"There may be much stricter controls on people travelling," he
tells us. "But if somebody isn't symptomatic, there's not much you
can do. And the capacity of Guinea authorities to instigate that
level of control is quite limited. With avian flu, you would go
through Beijing airport and have your temperature monitored.
"I would have real concerns about whether Guinea could issue
that level of control."