Don’t Touch the Walls African Hospital Warns Against Ebola

“Don’t touch the walls!” a Western medical technician yelled out. “Totally infected.”

Some Ebola patients still die at the hospital, perhaps four per day, in the tent like temporary isolation ward at the back of the muddy grounds. 

But just as many, if not more, are dying in the city and neighboring villages, greatly increasing the risk of spreading the disease and undermining international efforts to halt the epidemic.

 

Medical workers transferred the body of a man  who died of Ebola to the morgue in Kenema, Sierra Leone. Credit Tommy Trenchard for The New York Times

“It’s very, very dangerous, very hazardous; it is contributing to the Ebola dead,” he said as his two deputies nodded glumly in agreement. 

“You go to the wards, there are no patients.”

Containing the virus in Kenema — one of the nation’s largest cities and a gateway to an area of the country where the disease is rampant — is critical to taming the epidemic’s deadly advance across parts of West Africa. 

More than 930 people, including over 280 here in Sierra Leone, have died since the outbreak was first identified across the border in Guinea in March.

Since then, Sierra Leone has been hit with more cases of the disease than any other nation — 691out of 1,711 at last count — and the hospital in Kenema quickly became a focal point in the effort to grapple with the epidemic when the government set up a treatment center here for cases in the region.

International health officials have concentrated intensively on the hospital in the last several days, training health care workers, preparing a more secure isolation ward, establishing the rigorous separation of zones — low risk, high risk — that characterizes the tightly sealed Doctors Without Borders Ebola facilities elsewhere in stricken West Africa.

But it is a tough struggle, and the recent history of the hospital looms. More than 20 health care workers at the hospital have died trying to battle the disease over the last several months, including nurses, support staff and the country’s leading doctor.nities, including parts of western Liberia to stop the spread of the virus from Sierra Leone.

Dead bodies have been appearing on the streets and in houses throughout Monrovia, with people staging roadblocks to ensure that health workers remove them. 

But with hospitals closed in the capital, it was unclear how many of the victims had died of Ebola, or from other causes. 

A health worker said his burial team, one of 12, picked up seven bodies in Monrovia and surrounding areas on Thursday alone. FULL STORY