16.1 In Practice: Responding to an Infectious Disease Outbreak amid a Humanitarian Emergency

This chapter highlights the work and leadership of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) and its humanitarian partners to respond to humanitarian needs that arise from international health emergencies. To accomplish these tasks, aid workers strive to learn from the challenges and successes of the immediate past: the 2010 cholera outbreak that ravaged Haitian communities reeling from a catastrophic earthquake; the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic that required a multisectoral, multinational global response in three countries; the 2018 Ebola “Outbreak 10” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) during an ongoing, multifaceted humanitarian crisis; and the 2020 coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that further complicated the DRC Ebola outbreak response (aside from its historic global effects). While learning from these humanitarian crises, response workers actively plan for an uncertain future in which populations everywhere—most acutely in disaster-prone countries with the fewest resources—face climate change and environmental degradation pressures likely to make infectious disease outbreaks more frequent globally in decades to come.