How Ebola turned a Guinean family tragedy into a west African crisis
When a toddler in Meliandou came into contact with a fruit bat, a trail of
devastation began that is far from reaching a conclusion
•
<
http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2014/oct/09/ebola-disease-in-a-day-li
ve> Live blog: Wednesday’s developments on the Ebola outbreak
* Clar Ni Chonghaile
<
http://www.theguardian.com/profile/clar-ni-chonghaile>
* Thursday 9 October 2014 07.45 BST
In December last year, near the village of Meliandou in southern Guinea,
two-year-old Emile was bitten by one of the fruit bats that fly through west
Africa’s skies, often gathering at dusk to roost in trees.
In that moment, Emile was destined for a place in history as Patient Zero,
the unfortunate first victim of an Ebola outbreak that has already killed
more than
<
http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/136020/1/roadmapsitrep_8Oct2014_en
g.pdf?ua=1> 3800 people and wreaked havoc across some of the most fragile
countries in west Africa. The crisis has been described as “unparalleled in
modern times”.
On 26 December, Emile fell ill with fever. He died two days later. Eight
days after that, his three-year-old sister Philomena died. His mother Sia
succumbed to the disease on 11 January, and his grandmother Koumba three
days later, in a hospital in the nearby town of Guéckédou. Researchers
believe that their funerals marked the next steps on the virus’s devastating
sweep through Guinea and across the nearby borders into Liberia and Sierra
Leone.
“Following the young boy’s death, the mysterious disease continued to
smoulder undetected, causing several chains of deadly transmission,”
<
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/ebola-6-months/guinea/en/> according
to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Villagers were frightened, and
doctors were baffled. Some thought it was an outbreak of cholera. But no one
was sure, and in this information vacuum the virus reached nearby towns and
crossed borders.
The WHO identified Meliandou as lying in the outbreak’s “hot zone”: a
triangle-shaped forested area where the porous borders of Guinea, Liberia
and Sierra Leone converge. These countries have endured years of intertwined
conflict over diamonds and other resources, leaving them with limited health
services and a population used to crossing borders to seek work or refuge.
In a
<
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/ebola-6-months/guinea-chart-big.png?ua
=1> chart mapping the current outbreak’s spread, the WHO says a friend of
Emile’s family from Sierra Leone contracted the disease and died in Kangama,
which lies south-west of Guéckédou and across the border. The graphic’s
Ebola tree of death also shows Koumba’s nephew travelling to the Guinean
capital, Conakry, where he died on 5 February.
So began a chain of viral devastation, whose links represent individual
lives cut short and ineluctable steps on Ebola’s path through west Africa.
In an <
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1404505#t=article>
article published in the New England Journal in April, researchers also
tracked the spread of the outbreak, saying an infected health worker
extended the disease’s reach beyond Guéckédou to surrounding areas.
“On 10 March 2014, hospitals and public health services in Guéckédou and
Macenta alerted the ministry of health of Guinea and – two days later –
Médecins sans Frontières about clusters of a mysterious disease
characterised by fever, severe diarrhoea, vomiting and an apparent high
fatality rate,” the researchers wrote.
On 23 March, the WHO published a formal notification of an Ebola outbreak in
Guinea on its website. By 8 August, it declared the epidemic to be a “public
health emergency of international concern”.
That month, a
<
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/23/ebola-outbreak-blamed-on-fru
it-bats-africa> team of European and African researchers confirmed the
hypothesis that the outbreak was caused by a toddler’s contact with a single
infected bat.
The 17 experts spent three weeks around Meliandou, interviewing residents
and capturing bats and other animals. They concluded that the disease was
spread by colonies of migratory fruit bats.
Today, more than nine months after Emile’s death, exhausted and often
ill-equipped health workers are still battling the virus in Sierra Leone,
Guinea and Liberia. Smaller outbreaks were identified in Senegal and Nigeria
but were swiftly brought under control. The
<
http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/united-states-impor
ted-case.html> first diagnosed case of Ebola in the US was announced on 30
September.
On 6 October, Spanish authorities said that a
<
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/07/ebola-crisis-substandard-equip
ment-nurse-positive-spain> nurse who treated a Spanish priest – who had
contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone and subsequently died in Madrid – had
tested positive for the disease. She became the first person to contract the
disease outside west Africa.
Received on Fri Oct 10 2014 - 13:16:53 EDT
