Researchers looked to the past to see how society handled plagues in hopes of gaining insight into today's Ebola outbreak.
How the people of fourteenth century Venice Italy dealt with the plague could hold lessons on how we can mitigate modern threats such as climate change and infectious diseases such as Ebola, Springer reported.
Venice was the epicenter of many trade routes, causing it to get hit hard by the plague in 1347. Venetians initially tried to mitigate the threat through traditional risk management methods such as prayer and rituals, but to no avail; the people eventually began to utilize what the researchers call "resilience management."
Instead of trying to target the disease itself authorities focused on "managing physical movement, social interactions, and data collection for the city as a system," Springer reported. This included methods such as "spection, lazaretto (quarantine stations) on nearby islands, quarantine periods, and wearing protective clothing."
These actions did little to stop the initial devastation of the disease, but after several hundred years Venice continued the flourish with only small, sporadic bouts of plague while other areas of Europe battled the epidemic for centuries.
While it will be difficult to change cultural traditions that may have contributed to the spread of Ebola in West Africa national leaders could encourage improvements by boosting the ability of other parts of the system to respond to the re-emergence of the disease.
"Resilience management can be a guide to dealing with the current Ebola outbreak in Africa, and others like it, as well as other issues like population growth and the impacts of global climate change," said Igor Linkov of the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, and a visiting professor of the Ca Foscari University in Italy. "Similar to what the officials of Venice did centuries ago, approaching resilience at the system level provides a way to deal with the unknown and unquantifiable threats we are facing at an increasing frequency."
The findings were reported in Springer's journal Environment Systems and Decisions.
