Fighting Ebola on the front line

Amber Kunkel’s mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Research Journal of the Institut Pasteur published a captivating focus on Amber Kunkel’s experience in Democratic Republic of the Congo, from the outbreak that ended in July 2018 to the epidemic currently raging.

She left for the Democratic Republic of the Congo on July 5, 2018 in response to the WHO’s call for international help. “We offered epidemiologists, laboratory scientists, and anthropologists to deploy through WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) within days after they released a Request for Assistance,” explains Dr. Eileen Farnon, head of the OITF, a program that has been coordinating outbreak responses by scientists across the Institut Pasteur International Network since 2015. WHO gave the green light to Dr. Kunkel’s mission, “so she could provide her expertise to the final stage of the response.” [...]

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Dr. Kunkel is a post-doctoral fellow and a key member of the Pasteur Outbreak Investigation Task Force (OITF). She will be in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, alongside Dr. Eileen Farnon, in March to share her knowledge during the Introduction to Outbreak Investigation and Response course co-organized by HKU-Pasteur.

Between field missions, Dr. Amber Kunkel (right) with Dr. Eileen Farnon (left), head of the Outbreak Investigation Task Force on the Institut Pasteur campus in Paris, in January 2019. © Institut Pasteur/François Gardy.