Medical Mystery: Why Did Ebola Pop Up In A Remote Mining District?
Nurith Aizenman
NPR.org
December 12, 2014
No cars for the teams seeking Ebola cases. Not enough ambulances to get the sick to the hospital quickly. And no cups for patients to drink from.
That’s how bad things have been in a remote Eastern district of Sierra Leone called Kono.
Kono District is a land of towering mountains and muddy diamond mines. It’s right next to the region where the Ebola outbreak first started. Still, for a long time, it looked as if the virus was mostly bypassing the place.
Over the summer, there were just a handful of cases, says Winnie Romeril, the World Health Organization’s spokeswoman in Sierra Leone. There were a few cases a week in September and October. “And then suddenly in November we noticed a rise in the number of cases,” Romeril says.
The actual figures were still fairly low: a few dozen sick people at the district’s only hospital. To date the total number of confirmed cases in Kono is just over 120. But the suddenness of the rise was ominous.
“We were analyzing these figures and scratching our heads and thinking well, we need to go see what’s going on,” she says.
Romeril was in a group of aid workers and government and international organization officials that arrived last Saturday. Their first stop was the hospital. They found it overwhelmed with desperately sick people. Dead bodies were piling up. As for the nurses: “You could see the toll that was taken on the staff. I mean they were, they were some of the most exhausted, depressed looking people I’ve ever seen,” says Romeril.
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