This doctor fought Ebola in the trenches. Now he's got a better way to stop diseases

For over 20 years, Dr. Daniel Bausch has responded to disease outbreaks, spending months at a time treating patients with diseases such as dengue, yellow fever, Lassa fever and Ebola. Now he's focusing on the importance of diagnostics. It's "one of the key aspects of preparedness," he says. (Shuran Huang for NPR)

For decades, Dr. Daniel Bausch fought the world's most dangerous emerging tropical viruses directly from the trenches: He has trapped bats in Democratic Republic of Congo in search of the animal reservoir of Marburg virus. He has jumped into outbreaks of diseases such as dengue, yellow fever, Lassa fever and Ebola, spending months at a time treating patients in lower income countries ranging from El Salvador to Guinea. When NPR first spotlighted Bausch's efforts back in 2014, he had come off a stretch in Sierra Leone as one of only two doctors caring for 60 patients in an Ebola ward.

But now Bausch says of this work, "You realize that's all on the response side. And do we want to be responding forever? Putting on the band-aid each time something happens, and then the cycle of another outbreak begins?"