Along with the dire predictions and pictures of the suffering, some amazing stories have come out of countries battling the Ebola epidemic.
Yesterday, an ominous story in the New York Times ("Fresh Graves Point to Undercount of Ebola Toll") detailed an account from a graveyard in Liberia, noting the large discrepancy between official case tolls and burials.
Today, we have two very interesting pieces. The first, called Liberians Explain Why the Ebola Crisis Is Way Worse Than You Think, describe both life in Liberia as it used to be, and as it is now:
Abel: I worry a lot about the future of our children's education. I was at the verge of paying my children's tuition when the government announced the closure of all schools in the country. For now, I am my children's tutor at home.
. . .
Frances: Many were afraid that if you have malaria, you have common cold, you have fever, you go to the hospital, they would diagnose you as an Ebola patient... I even got sick during the outbreak. I was afraid to go to the hospital. I had to do my own medication, but God looked out for me. I'm well. But these were the messages that were going around, that once you have this, they will confine you to a place, they will quarantine you for 21 days, they will inject you. So many Liberians were afraid to go to hospitals. But now the message has spread out. We now know people are surviving of Ebola. Even if it is not Ebola, you just have malaria, you go there, you are treated. They get you tested; they release you on time.
. . .
Lawrence (the Liberia country director for Accountability Lab): Hunger is really hitting the country… If the ships are not coming, [farmers] are not making rice, the stockpiles are depleted…the animals are eating the crops, what happens then? The production will decrease, the price will increase, and if you don't have money, what is going to happen? Hunger is going to strike… This is a serious war, without bullets.
It's perhaps unsurprising that the collateral damage from the epidemic is as bad or worse than the epidemic itself. But these stories help to bring it home.
The other story, from the journal Nature, is Infectious disease: Ebola’s lost ward:
[Sheik Humarr] Khan and his team came to the fight against Ebola armed with experience battling another virus: Lassa, which like Ebola causes a life-threatening illness that sometimes results in haemorrhagic fever. But Lassa has much more predictable annual infection cycles. Along with [Robert] Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, and an international team of scientists, Khan had spent the better part of a decade building a Lassa treatment and research programme at Kenema, including a dedicated ward and a modern diagnostic laboratory. The ward they were adding was the next step in their arsenal against the disease.
But before it could be completed, the Lassa lab diagnosed Sierra Leone’s first case of Ebola. Hundreds more followed. And a medical facility that had been set up to study one disease suddenly found itself overwhelmed by another.
. . .
Back in Cambridge, [Pardis] Sabeti was analysing data from the samples that Garry had shipped out of Kenema. Her group now had 99 Ebola virus samples from the first 78 patients in the country’s outbreak. The researchers were performing in-depth genetic sequencing to track the way the virus mutated as it passed from person to person. No one had ever gathered these kinds of data on an outbreak while it was unfolding.
. . .
It is the sort of work that could eventually change the way in which outbreaks are fought, says Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, which funded the work. “We would normally come out with an analysis like this two years after an outbreak is over,” he says. “To be able to do this is just extraordinary.”
. . .
By the time the paper on the sequencing of the first 78 cases was published (S. K. Gire et al. Science 345, 1369–1372; 2014), on 28 August, six of its authors, including Khan and Fonnie, had died.
. . .
Sabeti, Garry and their colleagues are now preparing for the next step in their research: sequencing samples from every Ebola patient seen at Kenema since 18 June. They hope that the data will reveal whether the virus is continuing to mutate at the same rate and in the same genetic regions as before, and whether the mutations seen in the current outbreak made different circulating viruses more or less able to transmit between people and cause death. The data will also tell a more personal story, revealing the precise path taken by the virus as it infected Khan, Aunty Mbalu and so many of their colleagues. They, too, are represented in the samples.
This lab did some great work doing the initial genetic sequencing of the epidemic virus, and the loss of researchers there has been significant. It's a tribute to the professionalism of the staff that they continue to do their work under the conditions they face.
In many ways, for many of us, Africa is about as far away as "far away" gets. It's important to remember that, even among abject poverty, most people are just people--living their lives, loving their loved ones, hoping for the future. Africa has been making great strides recently, and that includes Liberia and Sierra Leone. Much of this progress is under grave threat.
Let's hope this can be turned around, and quickly.