Alison Schafer is a trained psychologist working with the international humanitarian agency World Vision.

On January 12, she went to ­Sierra Leone from her home in Melbourne to work on the social, emotional and psychological effects of the Ebola epidemic, which during the past year has killed more than 10,250 people in ­Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

For a fleeting moment last spring, the epidemic sweeping West Africa might have been stopped. But the opportunity to control the virus, which has now caused more than 7,800 deaths, was lost.