For Want of Gloves, Ebola Doctors Die
On the front lines of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, health-care workers believe its toll on their own staffs could be mitigated if only they had enough basic hospital supplies such as gloves
By Drew Hinshaw
WSJ.com
Aug. 15, 2014
SERGEANT KOLLIE TOWN, Liberia—Rubber gloves were nearly as scarce as doctors in this part of rural Liberia, so Melvin Korkor would swaddle his hands in plastic grocery bags to deliver babies.
His staff didn’t bother even with those when a woman in her 30s stopped by complaining of a headache. Five nurses, a lab technician—then a local woman who was helping out—cared for her with their bare hands.
Within weeks, all of them died. The woman with a headache, they learned too late, had Ebola.
Somewhere in the workplace exchange of handshakes and sweat, Dr. Korkor caught the virus, too. For five days, he read the Bible on a cot in an Ebola ward, watching his colleagues bleed to death from a disease they weren’t equipped or trained to treat. Across the room, a nurse pregnant with what would have been her third child slipped away. “She told me ‘Doc, I’m dying,’ ” he recalled Kou Gbanjah saying.
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