Sierra Leone's 365 Ebola deaths traced back to one healer
Kenema (Sierra Leone) - It has laid waste to the tribal chiefdoms of Sierra Leone, leaving
hundreds dead, but the Ebola crisis began with just one healer's claims to
special powers.
The outbreak need never
have spread from Guinea, health officials revealed to AFP, except for a
herbalist in the remote eastern border village of Sokoma.
"She was claiming
to have powers to heal Ebola. Cases from Guinea were crossing into Sierra Leone
for treatment," Mohamed Vandi, the top medical official in the hard-hit
district of Kenema, told AFP.
"She got infected
and died. During her funeral, women around the other towns got infected."
Ebola has killed more
than 1,220 people since it emerged in southern Guinea at the start of the year,
spreading first to Liberia and cutting a gruesome and gory swathe through
eastern Sierra Leone since May.
The tropical pathogen
can turn people into de facto corpses with little higher brain function and
negligible motor control days before they die.
The virus attacks almost
every section of tissue, reducing organs and flesh in the most aggressive
infections to a pudding-like mush which leaches or erupts from the body.
The virus is highly
infectious through exposure to bodily fluids, and its early rapid spread in West
Africa was attributed in part to relatives touching victims during traditional
funeral rites.
The herbalist's mourners
fanned out across the rolling hills of the Kissi tribal chiefdoms, starting a
chain reaction of infections, deaths, funerals and more infections.
A worrying outbreak
turned into a major epidemic when the virus finally hit Kenema city on June 17.
An ethnically-diverse,
Krio-speaking city of 190,000, Kenema already has the highest incidence of
Lassa fever -- another viral haemorrhagic disease -- in the world.
But the brutality and
cold efficiency of the Ebola virus -- described in medical literature as a
"molecular shark" -- caught the city's shabby, chaotic hospital
off-guard.
'Deadly and unforgiving'
-
Crumpled photographs of
dead nurses cover notice boards on the flaking walls outside the maternity unit
and in the administration block.
Twelve nurses have been
among 277 people to die since the first case showed up in Kenema hospital. A
further ten have been infected with Ebola and survived.
"The nurses who
lost their lives and those who got infected would never have gone in knowing
that they would get infected," Vandi, the district medical officer, told
AFP.
"We are fighting a
battle that is new. Ebola is new here and we are all learning as we go
along."
The first case at the
hospital was a woman who had partially miscarried, having probably passed the
virus to her unborn child.
The facility boasts the
only Lassa fever isolation unit in the world, set apart from the main building,
and a makeshift Ebola unit was quickly set up there.
It was then that the
nurses began dying.
As head sister of the
Lassa fever ward for more than 25 years, Mbalu Fonnie was credited with
attending to more haemorrhagic fever patients than anyone in the world.
She had survived Lassa
fever herself, but was no match for the Ebola virus when it got into her
bloodstream from a patient in July.
She was dead within
days, along with fellow nurses Alex Moigboi and Iye Gborie, and ambulance
driver Sahr Niokor.
The deaths prompted a
strike of 100 nurses, who complained of poor management of the Ebola centre.
"Wherever the Ebola
virus strikes for the first time, there is a heavy toll on healthcare workers
because they don't have experience with it," Vandi told AFP.
"The Ebola virus is
deadly and unforgiving. The slightest mistake you make, you will get
infected."
SOURCE: YAHOO NEWS
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