TIME Person of the Year 2. Ebola Fighters. By David von Drehle, with Aryn Baker / Liberia. On the outskirts of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, on grassy land among palm trees and tropical hardwoods, stands a cluster of one- story bungalows painted cheerful yellow with blue trim. This is the campus of Eternal Love Winning Africa, a nondenominational Christian mission, comprising a school, a radio station and a hospital. Jerry Brown, the hospital. Patients with the rare and deadly disease were turning up at a clinic in Lofa County. Even in ordinary circumstances, the doctor? Since the summer, the makeshift Jungle has quadrupled in size - it is now home to 6,000 desperate people. They are living in slum conditions, surviving on charity handouts and risking their lives under the wheels of trains. Would you have a look at this X- ray? What do you make of this rash? Inevitably, Brown would raise his eyebrows and crease his forehead as if surprised that anyone would think he might know the answer. Just as inevitably, he would have one. Ebola was different.
Tourists flocking to Rio de Janeiro for the Olympic Games now have the option to stay in favelas. I did a 3 hour walking tour of the Dharavi slum in Mumbai. Read about my experiences here + watch a video that I took inside! On this subject, Brown had more questions than answers. He knew the virus was contagious and highly lethal. But why was it in Liberia? Previous Ebola outbreaks had been primarily in remote Central Africa. Could the disease be contained in the rural north? The membrane between countryside and city in Liberia was highly porous; people flowed into Monrovia in pursuit of jobs or trade and flowed back to their villages, families and friends. A poor nation still shaky after years of civil war, Liberia. How could Liberia possibly deal with Ebola?(Read the Ebola Doctors’ Stories)Because he couldn. At a staff meeting, he assigned Dr. Debbie Eisenhut, an American with Serving in Mission (SIM), to research the disease. By combing the Internet, Eisenhut found what little there was to know about Ebola virus. In its early stages, Ebola looked like any number of human infections common in that part of the world, including malaria: fever, achiness, a general sense of malaise. By the time it produced more shocking symptoms. As for treatments, her findings were meager: fluids to stave off dehydration and Tylenol for pain. And to prevent its spread, chlorine bleach solution to disinfect skin, clothes, bedding and floors. There was no known cure. Eisenhut. And this posed further questions for Brown. The Eternal Love Winning Africa (ELWA) hospital didn. No hospital in Liberia had one. Looking around the compound for a solution, Brown. The bulk of them said, . John Fankhauser, another volunteer, a family physician from Ventura, Calif., had a ready answer to those objections. Jesus himself treated patients in the house of God, Fankhauser noted. Still, the idea remained unpopular, so Brown tried a more personal brand of persuasion. One by one, or in small groups, he asked the upset hospital workers, ? If the ELWA facility is not prepared to treat patients, where will you go? Eisenhut took charge of the chapel conversion, assisted by Dr. Kent Brantly, a physician from Texas who had moved to Liberia with his family as part of the Christian relief group Samaritan. The chapel would be needed only as a safe place to hold infected patients while they awaited test results and transfers. Vast and tragic questions lie behind that mistaken assumption. The Ministry of Health did virtually nothing. Why did it fail to take timely action? And why was the failure replayed in Guinea and Sierra Leone? Why were so many officials from Washington to Geneva to Beijing unable to see what Brown could see, unable to prepare as he prepared? Many on the front lines believe the actual numbers are much higher. The virus has traveled to Europe and North America, where the resulting fear exceeded any actual threat to public health. In West Africa, however, the impact has been catastrophic. The number of Liberians with jobs fell by nearly half as businesses and markets closed in fear of Ebola. In Guinea, the epidemic stoked distrust of government and aid workers. Medical missionaries were driven from villages by violence and threats. Read More: The Ebola Caregivers’ Stories. Ebola should not have been a surprise. The steady expansion of human habitat brings people into contact with remote reservoirs of poorly understood diseases, and mobile populations allow pathogens to infect large numbers in a short time. The story of Ebola is the story of SARS, of MERS. All are animal- borne viruses that crossed to humans; HIV and Ebola even come from the same region of Central Africa. But lessons are easily forgotten, it seems, in the face of feckless African governments and complacent Western powers, rival healers and turf- guarding bureaucrats. National and global health authorities would wait five months beyond March to acknowledge the unfolding disaster. Health ministries would ignore the warnings of doctors who were seeing the hot zone firsthand. WHO would initially rebuff efforts by the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help. By the time the authorities woke up, the epidemic was galloping away from them. There will be time, when the still- raging epidemic is finally conquered, to dissect the failures. For now, consider the stories of individuals who stood up to Ebola and, by doing so, raised hopes that victory is possible. In the memorable words of an essay by one volunteer, Ella Watson- Stryker, they found themselves . The nearest modern medical facility to the original outbreak was an MSF clinic in Gueckedou intended primarily to treat malaria. In February patients began arriving at the clinic with high fevers. Clinic doctors flashed word to MSF headquarters in Geneva. Alarmed, the higher- ups dispatched a small team of investigators to bring back blood samples for testing. Like Ebola, Lassa can cause pain and bleeding. Unlike Ebola, Lassa was known to be common in West Africa. Though somewhat less deadly, Lassa is still a matter of grave concern. Even before the test results were back, MSF assembled a sort of infectious- disease SWAT team to head off an epidemic. Watson- Stryker, a veteran public- health educator, got the call at her apartment in New York and within days was on a jet to Geneva for briefings. While changing planes, she checked her phone and learned that the lab results were back and the samples contained Ebola. She set off for the forest of Guinea as part of a team that would not only treat patients but also trace their contacts and educate their families and neighbors on the nature and prevention of the disease. The team would also try to get a picture of how widespread the problem might be. Their two- car convoy jounced and slogged for two days over bad roads to reach the clinic in Gueckedou. They were really exhausted. The group, which was honored with the 1. Nobel Peace Prize, is fiercely independent, with the vast majority of its budget coming from private donations. In 2. 01. 3, MSF amassed more than $1 billion globally. Having a large and unrestricted revenue stream allows MSF to shun red tape and to speak honestly about conditions in the places where its medics venture. The organization is often among the first and loudest reporters of bad health news that local officials would prefer to keep quiet. Read More: The Ebola Scientists’ Stories. Being effective did not guarantee a warm welcome, however. The MSF team encountered a local population hostile to outsiders. After decades, even centuries, of strife and misrule, the civil fabric of Guinea was badly frayed, and now this mysterious disease fired all sorts of rumors. Guineans could not help noticing that the foreigners and the Ebola virus had entered their lives almost simultaneously. On land near the clinic, construction crews were pouring concrete floors for tents to be filled with Ebola patients who had yet to materialize. Figures clad head- to- toe in waterproof protective suits, bug- eyed in goggles, went house to house with sprayers pumping who- knows- what onto the ground from tanks on their backs. It was chlorinated water to kill the virus, but some locals concluded that MSF workers were in Gueckedou to kill them. A young driver employed by MSF told Watson- Stryker that his father had stopped speaking to him because he was involved with the clinic. More than once, her car was stoned. As she approached one home, the man of the house emerged holding a knife that he tapped menacingly against his thigh. Thwarted by rampant suspicion, Watson- Stryker hired local Guineans as her eyes and ears, sending them into villages to get a sense of the outbreak. They would talk and listen with village leaders, often returning with alarming reports. Previous Ebola outbreaks had been isolated in a single area, but now the virus was widespread. In raw numbers, the Ebola outbreak might have seemed small compared with the chronic contagions of cholera and malaria in West Africa. But an epidemic of Ebola, with its ghastly effects, could corrode civil society by spreading panic. The disease leaped to the top of MSF. Liu recalls fruitless conversations in March with ministries of health in the region, . Underfunded and overly bureaucratic, WHO is, in the eyes of its many critics, woefully inadequate in dealing with rapidly emerging threats like Ebola. At this same critical moment, WHO offices in West Africa turned away a team of experts from the CDC working in Guinea, insisting that their help was not needed, says CDC director Dr. The CDC, a large and very well- regarded public- health agency, is unsurpassed in its capacity for action, maintaining some 2,0. Those workers in turn can often summon resources from the U. S. Instead, WHO closed the door, says Frieden. The CDC would be back in the summer, when Ebola was running wild, to train local volunteers in the crucial techniques of tracing and evaluating the contacts of Ebola patients. By then, however, the challenge would be incalculably greater. Frieden says he intervened personally with WHO. April turned to May, and still Ebola had not reached the capital. There was one close call: an infected traveler from Lofa County commuted through the city on her way to the town of Harbel, where she died.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |