Question: What was it like to be able to work and help with these diseases such as ebola?

anon answered on 9 Jun 2017:

It’s daunting. Over 20,000 people got Ebola virus disease over the course of the epidemic and most who got Ebola died.

I didn’t go to medical school, so I can’t go out and care for patients. But what I can do, back in London, is gear up and pull a team together who will work as hard as we can analysing the data sent back to us.

We feel we owe this to help the patients, to help the doctors and nurses putting their own health on the line and to the communities both local, national and international to keep everyone as safe as we possibly can.

So we work hard – very hard. Long hours, little sleep. Often really tired, sometimes fairly cranky (see earlier tired). But working as a team we support each other and rely on each other’s work. We have to work fast, but we have to work accurately as well. We check – and double and triple check – our own work and that of our colleagues. We look at different approaches to the same questions to see if we get consistent answers.

We once had a conference call at 4am – we were all in different places (in my case a hotel two blocks from my Imperial office). But despite everyone’s exhaustion we made progress and delivered our results.

Finally – let me just add that plenty of epidemiologists do great work without working like this. There are lots of important diseases that don’t come in sudden outbreaks and epidemics. This intense way of working doesn’t suit everyone – but I find it extremely rewarding (as well as exhausting — also work is much more likely to make me cry when I work like this).