Research Article Tactics and Strategies for Managing Ebola Outbreaks and the Salience of Immunization Wayne M. Getz, 1,2 Jean-Paul Gonzalez, 3 Richard Salter, 4 James Bangura, 5 Colin Carlson, 1 Moinya Coomber, 6 Eric Dougherty, 1 David Kargbo, 7 Nathan D. Wolfe, 3 and Nadia Wauquier 6,8 1 Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA 2 School of Mathematical Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Private Bag X54001, Durban 4000, South Africa 3 Metabiota, Inc., 1 Sutter Street, Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94104, USA 4 Computer Science Department, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH 44074, USA 5 Metabiota, Inc., 24 Main Motor Road, Congo Cross, Freetown, Sierra Leone 6 Metabiota Inc., Kenema Government Hospital, Kenema, Sierra Leone 7 Directorate of Disease Prevention and Control, DPC Ministry of Health and Sanitation, Freetown, Sierra Leone 8 Sorbonne Universit´ e, UPMC, Universit´ e de Paris 06, CR7, CIMI-Paris, 75005 Paris, France Correspondence should be addressed to Wayne M. Getz; wgetz@berkeley.edu Received 2 December 2014; Revised 9 January 2015; Accepted 12 January 2015 Academic Editor: Chung-Min Liao Copyright © 2015 Wayne M. Getz et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We present a stochastic transmission chain simulation model for Ebola viral disease (EVD) in West Africa, with the salutary result that the virus may be more controllable than previously suspected. Te ongoing tactics to detect cases as rapidly as possible and isolate individuals as safely as practicable is essential to saving lives in the current outbreaks in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Equally important are educational campaigns that reduce contact rates between susceptible and infectious individuals in the community once an outbreak occurs. However, due to the relatively low  0 of Ebola (around 1.5 to 2.5 next generation cases are produced per current generation case in na¨ ıve populations), rapid isolation of infectious individuals proves to be highly efcacious in containing outbreaks in new areas, while vaccination programs, even with low efcacy vaccines, can be decisive in curbing future outbreaks in areas where the Ebola virus is maintained in reservoir populations. 1. Introduction Beginning with a hypothesized natural reservoir-to-human spillover of the Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) in Guinea in Febru- ary 2014 [1, 2], by mid-November this outbreak had grown to more 15,000 cases, which is at least thirty times larger than the largest Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in recorded history [3]. Tough small by pandemic standards, mortality rates around 30–90% [4, 5] make EBOV and allied flovirus of the same family some of the most feared pathogens in the world. Further, beside the social human cost, failure to control epidemics has catastrophic consequences for the economies of countries where major outbreaks occur [6] and substantial negative impacts on global travel and trade as well [7]. Current eforts to control the West African outbreak include, among other international agencies, deployment of WHO personnel and US Army units to help detect, isolate, and treat infectious individuals. Te outbreak itself is much more complex than suggested by the models we build to predict incidence rates over time and appears to be governed by diferent frequency parameters in diferent regions of West Africa. For example, a diferential equation model, ftted to incidence data for the current EVD outbreaks in West Africa, estimated  0 (the number of cases produced by each case at the start of the epidemic) to be 1.52, 2.42, and 1.65, respec- tively, in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia [8]. A related approach obtained an aggregated estimate of  0 = 1.78 across all of West Africa [9, 10]. Tese estimates, while useful, can Hindawi Publishing Corporation Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine Volume 2015, Article ID 736507, 9 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/736507